Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes: > So it is a client side filtering. Curently there is no spam on the > mailing lists - as it goes in for moderator approval. If we switch > everyone will get spam - and users filters would have to take care of > things. I guess gmail does it one way - but not everyone is on gmail.
Everyone with an email address gets sent spam so they must have some filtering mechanism in place. And no-subscription list traffic is not necessary; we could keep the current moderation system. > And then - if gmail spam fails because of "Reply-to: petsc-maint" - > then thats a useless spam filter. RT doesn't have to set that > field. Any spamer can do that trivially. Yes, but they have to have done their homework to know that petsc-maint has some significance to me. If they did that much, they would always send me email spoofed to look like it came from you, Barry, and my girlfriend. And every spam message to the Git list would be Reply-to: Linus, etc. But that doesn't happen, and even >> And header munging could be turned off without enabling anonymous >> posting. > > yes thats possible. With that - we'll be trading off 'enabling users > to subscribe-without-delivery' [who can easily use filters to prevent > mailing list traffic flooding their mailbox] - at the cost of everyone > remembering to 'reply-all' all the time. John Doe sends email to petsc-users and the mailing list rewrites Reply-To back to the list. Now any user hits reply-all and their mailer gives them a message that replies *only* to petsc-users, dropping the original author. This is a problem, and only a few mailers have a "when >From and Reply-To do not agree, assume this is mailing list munging and disregard the intent of the Reply-To field (RFC 2822) by also replying to the address found in From" feature. In other words, any mailer that interprets the Reply-To field as its intended "instead of" semantics rather than "in addition to" will drop the original author, meaning lost replies for people that are not subscribed or have delivery disabled. Perhaps a middle ground would be to have the list copy the From header over to Reply-to (if it doesn't already exist) and then _add_ the list address to Reply-to. That still isn't quite right when cross-posting, but it would allow us to advertise "subscribe with delivery off and ask questions on the list" or even "mail the list without subscribing" instead of "always write petsc-maint if you can't be bothered to filter the high-volume list".
