Re: How to deal with mailing list hit by spammers

[Bob Proulx]

Karl Berry wrote:
> 4. To avoid seeing the flood of notifications, I suggest filtering in
> your mail reader. E.g., my .procmailrc recipes (except I don't actually
> send them to /dev/null; any filename is fine, relative to ~):

Unfortunately Mailman itself has no way to tell it not to send the
moderator notifications only to the moderator address and not also to
the owner address.  I really wish it had a way to do that.

Filtering is a good suggestion.  I do that for myself too.

If filtering is not easy for you for whatever reason then I suggest
changing the "owner" address to listhelper-moderate@gnu.org
(listhelper-moderate AT gnu DOT org) which is the team address.  That
address already has filtering of all of the things Karl mentioned.
Mail for the owner will go to the team address and be read by a human
and responded to in those very rare cases that a person sends a
message there.

The owner address is there for people to write to for help in
subscribing or unsubscribing from the mailing list.  We are always
happy when people write there as that is the right place to get help
for unsubscribing.

Note that changing the owner address simply avoids the mailman
moderation notifications.  You can still log into the mailing list web
admin interface as often as you like.  And still tend to any pending
moderation requests.  And all of that.  It just redirects the endless
stream of noise away from your address and over to the default where
we already have filters in place to deal with it.

Bob