TLUG's value to community ???

[John Macdonald]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 08:29:01PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 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.

The TPM list works like yours did originally - messages from
unrecognized addresses go to the admin who discards the spam
and passes on the real stuff (and perhaps notes alternate
addresses as acceptable - I don't know).  I've seen no spam
on that list ever (over 10 years) - maybe Harvey is a bit more
infallible in his approval process than you were. :-)

-- 
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml