[plug] [admin-plug.org.au 12346] Re: Step rise in moderation emails

[James Henstridge]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2025 at 10:19, Nick Bannon <nick at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Hi, Harry, James! Let's get this out of our admin list - anyone else
> out here up for helping us up our mailing-list-moderation skills?
>
> We're running the latest Mailman2, so there's a lot of low-hanging
> automation and tweaks we could do to the lists; but I suspect the
> best move we could do is deprecate a couple of our less-used lists,
> synchronise our settings across the remaining ones; and concentrate on
> our public plug at plug list.

Well, I've updated the spam mitigations as outlined, so let's see what happens.

I've set up two header_filter_rules, and applied the config across all
email lists:

1. Anything matching "X-Spam-Level: [*]{8}" (i.e. eight stars in the
header value) is discarded. This will discard anything with a spam
assassin score of >= 8.
2. Anything matching "X-Spam-Flag: YES" is held for moderation. This
will be anything with a spam assassin score >= 5.

The first might be a bit too aggressive, so we could increase the
threshold a bit. The second probably won't make a difference since
non-member posts are already held.

In conjunction with this, I restored a backup of the old server's Spam
Assassin Bayes database (as the appropriate users, "sa-learn --backup"
on one system, and "sa-learn --restore" on the other). I also fed all
the spam in the mailman moderation queues as spam examples too (using
my script to convert the held messages to an mbox file, then "sa-learn
--spam --mbox").

So far, it has auto-discarded a few spam messages. I guess we'll see
how it goes.

James.