There are basically two kinds of setups for mailing lists managed using Mailman, regarding posts from non-members :
- Accept posts from non-members. This lead to quite a lot of spam on the list, but also to no work for the moderators.
- Put posts from non-members in a moderation queue. This result in a spam-free mailing list, but also in a lot of work for moderators, and in posts delayed for days.
It would be great if Mailman could ask the sender for confirmation (either email-based or web-based) before accepting the mail or putting it in the moderation queue. This would greatly reduce the amount of spam on the list or in the moderation queue.
This is also known as Mailman feature request #673265. A similar feature has apparently been in Sympa for nearly 4 years.
matt@ucc.asn.au has a hack for mailman that does this.
That’s good news, but the problem with mailman is that we are largely dependent of installations made by the mailman admins: I personnally don’t run any mailman installation myself, I’m just a user of the ones provided by gna.org, gnome.org, savannah, ubuntu.com, etc, etc, etc.
It would be great if his patch was included into the mailman releases …
http://viewmtn.angrygoats.net/branch/changes/au.asn.ucc.matt.mailman.ucc is the local branch of mailman, this diff contains the code for sender-approval of emails. There’s also some other local hacks there but they should be easy to filter out if you want to prepare a patch for upstream.