Hi,

all mail going to lists also goes through spamassassin and gets a score.

If that score is over a certain threshold it gets rejected. Example from exim log on the list server:

"rejected after DATA: This message scored 16.0 spam points."

Under the global limit we don't delete mails because we want to let list admins have a chance to filter them based on their own list needs which ca be quite different.

As list admins you can go to Privacy options...-> [Spam filters] -> Spam Filter Regexp and filter based on the score there. You can also filter by other rules.

See:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lists.wikimedia.org#Fighting_spam_in_mailman

and

http://nbcs.rutgers.edu/mailman/spam.shtml

http://wiki.list.org/DOC/Can%20you%20show%20me%20some%20examples%20of%20%27header_filter_rules%27%3F

for more details.

hope that helped,

Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your detailed helpful reply.

I see two filter rules now in the list settings:

1. ^Subject: .*\?{5,}.*$
2. x-spam-status: yes

If I want to make the spam filters more strict, do I need to add more filter rules? and which ones could help the best with this case?

In T100428#1363538, @Selsharbaty-WMF wrote:

If I want to make the spam filters more strict, do I need to add more filter rules?

Either more, or better ones. :)

and which ones could help the best with this case?

Hard to say without spam examples, or data which scores such messages receive. The links provided by Dzahn should provide some help though?

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lists.wikimedia.org#Fighting_spam_in_mailman is the documentation that is on wikitech. Better spam management will come with mailman v3 which is on the radar for some point (not this year, next year may be a stretch in my opinion). Is there any reason to keep this open? (mostly condensing open tickets regarding spam.)

Hi John,

I will close it now. I have applied a new filter blocking messages with certain common spam words in the subject. It worked and no spam messages at all came to the list sense then.

The list is here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30684/The-Ultimate-List-of-Email-SPAM-Trigger-Words.aspx

Thanks,

@JohnLewis please add the info from the mail you sent, so we can use it to refer to when other lists have similar questions