Re: How to deal with mailing list ownership & moderators & spam to the lists?

Hi,

Thanks for the quick response!

On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 4:19 PM Stelian Ionescu <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> Daily, my mailbox is bombarded with mails reminding me to moderate mailing
> list traffic on common-lisp.net. On occasion I have acted on these
> messages, if I saw one come by where genuine traffic was held. Most of the
> time, they are mails trying to sell eBikes and other junk, though. While I
> haven't acted much on them, they do present distraction, both of genuine
> mail traffic as well as in my mind. I want to remove that distraction.
>
>
> Aren't messages directed to mailing lists going through a spam filter ?
> You could configure filters to drop any message that scores above 10 (which
> is IMO quite conservative).
>

They should be. Not really sure why they aren't being discarded. For most
of the items in the queue the logs are long gone (we retain only a few
weeks of logs for privacy reasons).


> Out of curiosity, I picked the last reminder I received this morning. It
> was from cells-devel@ . There are no moderators, which means that
> reminders go to the owners: Kenny Tilton and cl-net root@ (that is: Mark
> Evenson, Dave Cooper, Philipp Marek and me).
>
> There is a list of 333 moderations waiting. Accumulated between August
> 2024 and today. Actual list traffic: 1 mail in 2020 (without response!) and
> the last one before that was from 2012.
>
> The before-last reminder was to cffi-devel@. There 113 moderations are
> waiting. Last and before-last active mail threads (including replies) are
> from 2023 and 2021 respectively. Owner of the list are Luis Oliveira and
> root@; again, no moderators.  Conclusion: Although not as bad as with
> cells, nobody is acting on these reminders for cffi-devel either.
>
> The one before that: cl-opengl-devel@. Same story: 95 waiting
> moderations, most recent mail threads from 2022 and 2020.
>
>
> So, I see the following options (other than adding mail filters which
> simply delete these things on my side):
>
> 1. Remove root@ from the list of owners -- which presumably means root@
> can't help with admin tasks for these mailing lists anymore
>
>
> This should be done.
>

Ok. I did that. root@ isn't a co-owner of any of the lists anymore.


> 2. Copy the owners - excluding root@ - to the moderators so the flow to
> root@ stops
>
> This should be done too.
>

Without root@ in the list of owners, I think the effect is the same:
without moderators configured, moderation mails go to the owners.


> 3. Forcibly set mailing lists to drop non-member posts - the current
> default seems to be to hold for moderation
>
> I don't know if it can be readily done, but I like how Google Groups work:
> trusted emails can post to any group without needing to subscribe (which is
> only for receiving emails from the list). For c-l.net, that could be the
> list of emails registered in the Gitlab instance, and possibly the list of
> emails subscribed to other lists as well.
>

This isn't straight forward. Moderators can select to add mail addresses to
the list of "nonmembers" -- a group of mail addresses which *are* able to
post to the list, even though they're not subscribed. The configuration I
was talking about was the *default* nonmember post action, which is
triggered for not-yet-registered-as-nonmember mail addresses.


> Another idea is to automatically drop messages that are in the moderation
> queue for more than 365 days. I believe Mailman 2 used to do that.
>
> Additionally, we could archive (remove submission possibility) for mailing
> lists which haven't received a single post for more than 5(?) or 7(?) or
> ... years.
>
> I don't think this is necessary.
>

Lets not do that for now then.

I'll ask one of the others to have a look at what happened with the spam
filter.

-- 
Bye,

Erik.

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