It would be nice if each user could install filters on Majordomo itself. Not only would we not need to buy Eudora Pro, but we wouldn't have to pay to download messages we didn't want to read, and without having to employ a moderator (censor).
Bad idea. It's tough enough on the host running a list with 1500 or 2000 people on it. Adding outbound filtering for each user would be a real burden on the list host. It's better to distribute the processing by making the user agent (or mail transport that's delivering to the user) do the filtering.
I guess you're not paying for your mail then :-) Just stand back from this for a moment - doesn't it seem just nonsensical to have a robot (majordomo) cranking out 10s of messages to 1000s of users, day in day out, just for other robots (filters) to delete them? And to pay for the privilege? I mean, is it really better to consume the cycles on _everybody's_ machine, _plus_ use all that bandwidth? I'd say that's not obvious. Granted, it takes my creaking old 486 about 10 minutes for exmh to do a filtered 'inc' on the new mail. However I have to pay the phone bills to download all the cruft in the first place, just in order to get the rare nugget. And I can't use my mailer while the 'inc' is running. And if everyone else is paying and and waiting too, then maybe it turns out to be better for the messages to be filtered centrally, so we all waste less time and money, even if the server does heat up a little. (Hell, I might even chip in to upgrade the list server if that's what it took, and still save money.) Besides, it's not necessarily true that filtering would make the server load significantly worse (certainly not if PGP is the other option), or even that it makes it worse at all. For example, the overhead on doing a lookup on a short list of filtered users might well be more than offset by not having to send the message. (Having once seen a DEC alpha brought to its knees by 'sendmail', I can believe that...). If processing turned out to be a genuine problem then maybe the list could be split over several servers. (In an ideal world, of course, the filtering agents would be mobile, and would learn to back all the way up the pipe and would eventually run on the spammer's machines :-)
In addition, a filtering majordomo will only 'protect' the lists that it serves. I don't know about you but I get a lot of spam from all sorts of different sources. I need to have a filter anyhow. It's not hard to add some more rules to filter out each lists's bozos. It's a lot simpler to do that than it would be to upload filter rules to each of the 10 or 12 listservers I get mail from.
True, but I'd sure love not to have to download some of the cruft down the old 28.8 line in the first place...I suppose IMAP would have the same thing going for it but it's not here yet (plus you still have all that list cruft that 99% of people filter or delete going up and down the internet). [ deletia ... The security issues you mention are real, but so are the solutions you mention :-) ] Cheers, Frank O'Dwyer.