[Theforum] css-discuss list hosting

Eric A. Meyer eric at meyerweb.com
Fri Nov 15 14:09:07 CST 2002


At 1:29 +0530 11/16/02, Madhu Menon wrote:

>>* the ability for me to set up sophisticated filters for better spam
>>management and policy enforcement
>>     This was mostly due to my desire to set up a filter that
>>automatically discards posts from non-members, but not those from
>>non-members that contained the string [css-d] in the subject line.
>
>Dunno if something like that is available out of the box in Mailman. We
>currently block all non-member messages at thelist - a measure that has
>saved a lot of porn spam coming through.

    Same with css-d.  Mailman can't be configured via the Web
interface to do that kind of thing, but I'm told that if an
administrator has shell access he can set up procmail recipes that
are used before messages even get to Mailman.  Or something.  I'm not
really a sysadmin myself so I'm a little vague on that sort of thing.

>Hey Eric, would you care to share your bookmarklets (off-list is fine) so
>that us list admins can try and cut down our work? The three of us deal
>with several bounces every day, and any time-saving measures are welcome.

    I'd be happy to: they're the links at the very top of
<http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/discuss/admin/widgets.html>.
Actually only the first three are admin widgets; the fourth is
something I wrote to overcome dumb sites that make their links the
same color as normal text.  Don't worry about the page itself messing
anything up, as it's just a source capture of an old Mailman span
filter page and can't be submitted.  If you guys are using Mailman
for thelist then the widgets ought to work for you as well.  The
"textareas" widget just suppresses or shows textareas, which compacts
the display of the spam filter rather nicely.  They aren't perfect
cure-alls but they have really sped up my spam handling on css-d.

>We have something like this in place on thelist. Dan, our former list
>admin, did some work to make that happen. So we can probably do the same
>for css-d.

    That would be cool.  I get kind of tired of rejecting MIME
messages and then being asked how to configure mail clients to not
send MIME messages.

>Just one question, Eric. Do you have a handle on the total bandwidth used
>up by the css-d list?

    Not a clue.  That's why I included the traffic volume and
subscriber list size in my original message; I figured anyone who ran
a mail server could make a rough guess of how those numbers would
translate into bandwidth in a given setup.  For a server that sends
out a single message to each subscriber, it would be easy (message
size * daily traffic * subscriber list), but as I understand it most
high-volume listservs batch messages together into largish blocks.
Of course I could be wrong about that too.

--
Eric A. Meyer  (eric at meyerweb.com)  http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/
Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide,"
  "Eric Meyer on CSS," "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference," and more
   http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/



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