TLUG's value to community ???

CLIFFORD ILKAY clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Mon Jul 11 00:29:01 UTC 2005


On July 10, 2005 18:59, billt-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > > Who owns the web server?  Drew.
> > > Who owns the mail server?  Drew.
> > > Who controls the (rather complex) configuration of the mail server? 
> > > Drew.
> >
> > Just curious, what is so complex about the configuration of the mail
> > server and why?
>
>  The why : Drew wrote the procmail filters over the last ten years. Those
> filters aren't unique to TLUG. I also suspect that there were others
> involved in the creation of the mess, but have never bothered to ask if
> this was a group effort or not. The what : More than 95% of the tlug
> inbound messages are spam that are filtered out by the magic of procmail.

I wonder if this is a Majordomo limitation or a limitation of the "legacy" 
process.

I am a co-admin of a Mailman list that has probably about the same number of 
subscribers as this one and because it is set to subscriber only postings, 
spam just does not make it through that admittedly low threshold. We have MM 
throw away messages not coming from subscribers, which has dropped the 
administrative overhead by a huge margin, and has also made the anti-spam 
efforts essentially automatic and less error prone.

Before we did that, posts from non subscribers would be held for approval by 
the list admins (e.g. me) and we found that 95% were indeed spam with the 
other 5% being posts from legitimate subscribers who happened to be posting 
from a different email address. It was all too easy, as was the case a couple 
of times, for a list admin to accidentally click on the "Approve" instead of 
"Reject" radio button for a given piece of spam and propagate the thing to 
everyone on the list. This would inevitably result in a flurry of messages 
complaining about that one piece of spam that managed to make it through out 
of the tens of thousands of legitimate messages, which raised the whole 
question of whether complaints about spam are actually worse than the spam, 
but I digress. We notified all the subscribers that we were changing the 
default list policy to throw away posts from non subscribers. We also told 
them that if they wanted to have the freedom to post from any number of 
addresses, they just had to subscribe all of the addresses they wanted to 
post from and set all but one to NOMAIL. This has worked marvelously for us.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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