UnBlog/2003-06-22

Mailman Non-Subscriber Message Auto-Rejector

I run a lot of mailing lists on mailman, http://www.list.org/, servers. Most all of these lists are configured so that only list subscribers are allowed to post messages. I do this because these lists get a lot of spam messages that I don't want to get through to all subscribers.

Unfortunately, when a non-subscriber posts they're not automatically rebuffed, but instead I, as the mailing list administrator, get an email asking if I want to approve their message anyway. If I don't answer that question I get get a reminder every 24 hours. The reminders can be turned off, but there are some of mailman's questions that I do want to have brought to my attention (ex: subscribed posters who have exceeded maximum message size, etc.).

What I wanted was a way to configure a mailman list so that non-subscribers get a message explaining why their post isn't being accepted without me having to go click 'reject' on a web form. I started to add this feature to mailman, but that wouldn't really wouldn't help. I can't get source forge or my company to upgrade to the newest version of mailman even if my features gets accepted, and those are my lists that get the most spam.

Instead, I wrote a filter that catches email indicating a non-subscriber user has posted to a list and automatically goes and clicks 'reject' on their message. I've got the auto-clicker coded up pretty carefully such that any pending requests that aren't non-subscriber posts won't get auto-rejected. Also, if there's any sort of error in the process the initial notification message is allowed through.

The whole thing fits into a nice tidy Perl script. It's invoked via procmail and requires the excellent LWP suite of modules available from CPAN. The script is attached.

mailman-auto-reject.pl

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