AUTOMATIC MESSAGE MODERATION FOR MAILING LISTS

Email messages in a mailing list for an organization are monitored and filtered (or queued for moderation) based on predetermined characteristics of the message. A manager of the mailing list can later determine whether the queued messages should be approved and distributed to the intended recipients or rejected and prevented from being distributed. Alternatively, an automatic decision is made to approve or reject messages based on the predetermined characteristics. The predetermined characteristics include: the size of the mailing list; the size of the email message; the existence of specified words (such as a product name or a specific word such as "confidential") within the message; no subject line; the sender has sent too many messages already; and the email address matches a list.