bcc settings on mailing lists

[Tim Bell]

Hi David

> Can we get some kind of global change to the mailing lists so that a bcc
> does not require moderator approval?

bcc: header lines are typically not passed to the recipient (that is
what makes it a blind carbon copy).  Refer to section 4.5.3 of RFC
822.

Unfortunately this loophole also describes a vector used by arriving SPAM.

Most email held for moderation by mailman is due to "Post by
non-member to a members-only list", but second place is "Message has
implicit destination", which is how mailman treats BCC: emails.

Looking at the current mailman/logs/vette file on mail.ojn (28MB,
going back to September of 2009) we have this breakdown of messages
held for moderation:

       5   Message may contain administrivia
      19   Too many recipients to the message
      29   The message headers matched a filter rule
      60   Post to moderated list
     201   nnnnnn bytes with a limit of mmm KB
     871   Message has implicit destination
  79870   Post by non-member to a members-only list

While the BCC: messages are ~100x less than the non-member messages,
that is still large enough that I hesitate to open up the rules and
allow them all through without moderation.

Do others have thoughts on this?

Cheers and Best Regards-

Tim Bell