Roundup Tracker

Some Roundup trackers have a publicly-available email address to which anonymous users (ie. users currently unknown to the tracker) may send messages. Note that the default configuration for Roundup is to reject such messages. It is possible though to configure Roundup to accept those messages and automatically register the sender of the message as a user of the tracker. This page contains some ideas about approaches to dealing with spam send to such trackers.

IMAP mailboxes

In this approach, all mail coming in to Roundup is captured in an IMAP mailbox. This box is called a "triage" area for the mail. Someone then scans that mail looking for valid mail, which is moved to some other IMAP folder. The roundup-mailgw process then reads mail from that folder.

IMAP filters (either on the server, or in the client of the triage operator) could be used to automatically move mail from the triage folder when conditions are met like the presence of an [issue] subject line.

Additional IMAP filters could be used to automaticallly weed out spam.

Spambayes integration

In this approach, a set of extensions to Roundup are written which pipe all incoming messages through Spambayes, producing a spam score. When new messages are rated as spam, they are rejected outright by an auditor.

The web interface would be extended to include actions for re-scoring messages (and destroying, rather than just retiring spam messages from the database).

See the implementation for the bugs.python.org tracker at:

Require designator

From wiki Mon Jun 20 15:51:52 +1000 2005
From: wiki
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:51:52 +1000
Subject: 
Message-ID: <20050620155152+1000@www.mechanicalcat.net>

Hmm..., forgot to tell who I am in my previous comment. Also did some part drop out.

Looks good, but it is rather quiet easy to limit the received spam by only accepting emails that have an [&lt;designator&gt;] in the subject like [issue] or [issue123]. We've changed the mailgw in our tracker to only accept those and 'till now we never have received spam in our tracker.

Regards,
Marlon

From richard Mon Jun 20 15:56:35 +1000 2005
From: richard
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:56:35 +1000
Subject: 
Message-ID: <20050620155635+1000@www.mechanicalcat.net>

Yep, that can help *if* you have end-users who put [issue] into their email subjects. This is not possible for some trackers that simply have their "support@" email address pointing to the tracker.