Subject: [Tools-discuss] Spam to [email-masked]

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2021 10:39:23 +0200

All [email-masked] lists have an associated address [email-masked], which is used as the envelope address for all messages sent from the mailman exploder to [email-masked].

For some values of wgname, [email-masked] has turned up in some spammers' address collection, and there is of course nothing that can be done about that.

Of course the spam messages don’t look like bounces, so the automatic handling of bounces in mailman cannot do anything useful with them. Mailman allows to configure whether the list admins get shown unidentifiable bounces.  Switching this off may be tempting, but that just means the admins fly blind for actual problems — the envelope address is useful; it allows the mailing list admins to notice when something is wrong.

But can we mitigate the spam to this address?

Not sure that spam filtering would help much here.

One mitigation might be to go “fast flux” on the bounces address, e.g. change it to wgname-bounces-2021-09 for this month and discard mail to older versions (only accept wgname-bounces-2021-08 as well) of the address.  I haven’t checked whether mailman already can do something like that; if not, that would require programming…

Simply occasionally changing the bounces address manually would be a low-tech variant of that (no idea whether it would be worth getting some overlap then).

Grüße, Carsten