[volunteers] Linux Compatible equipment available at bargainprices...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Andrew Fife (AFife at untangle.com):
> Peter Blair (pblair at rincontechnology.com) wrote:
>> Will do, I did not realize this was a distribution list.  My apologies.

Not intended as criticism of any party, but just as background
explanation:

All SVLUG mailing lists (including Volunteers) except for the Jobs
mailing list are set up as unmoderated for postings sent from subscribed
addresses.  Non-subscribed-sender postings get intercepted and held 
for listadmin approval, and there are also a few other filters to
intercept categories of postings that are likely to be inappropriate,
such as those Bcc'd ("implicitly addressed") to the list address, and
those with too many addressees in the To and/or Cc fields.  Intercepted
posts stay in an admin queue until approve, rejected, or discarded --
and there's a timeout of (I think) three days after which they're
discarded if not acted on.

The Jobs mailing list is a special case, because of the extreme
likelihood of abuse if it's not closely managed -- so it's (uniquely)
set up as a completely moderated mailing list:  Each and every posting,
whether from a subscribed address or not, must be approved by the
listadmin.  Otherwise, the post continues to be held in the admin queue
for three days, and then expires and is discarded.

By the way, at any given time, the contents of all of the mailing lists'
admin queues consists overwhelmingly of spam sent from non-subscribed
(and most often forged) sender addresses.  That is part of the reason
that the admin queues have a three-day timeout:  The queue prunes itself
out, automatically.

Over the years, SVLUG has created and deleted and renamed a number of
its mailing lists; typically, when a mailing list has gotten removed or
renamed, SVLUG has put in place an SMTP handler via the /etc/aliases
file to ensure that mail sent to the old address isn't rejected or lost:
Often, those aliases have gotten set to either the current mailbox of
one or more officer, or to a mailing list as a default destination.

One example is the address for "webmaster" that is on the group's Web
pages and elsewhere, advertised to the public as a point of contact for
the group:  Originally, for many years and then up through the first
months of the Reed/Ward administration, that address went to the
original incarnation of the web-team at lists.svlug.org (aka
web-team at svlug.org) mailing list for the Web Team.  So, in theory,
anyone who needed to talk to the Web Team about issues on the Web pages
or Web server could do so by using the mailto: links for webmaster on
our pages.

Back in the original days of the web-team mailing list, that mailing
list was set to allow posting from any address whether subscribed or
not, which seemed the most logical way to permit members of the public
(and especially SVLUG members) to talk to the Web Team without needing
to subscribe to a mailing list or wait for their mails to get approved
by a listadmin.  For a while, this worked, but then spam gradually
became a huge problem, and over time most postings in the
web-team at lists.svlug.org archive came to be spam -- maybe 95% of
postings.  Looking through the web-team archive today, you no longer see
what I'm referring to, but only because I manually went back and purged
all of that spam.

Bill Ward, as VP, decided as part of a reorg of all SVLUG mailing lists,
which he and Paul Reed carried out without consulting anyone, to
summarily delete the web-team, speakers, av-crew, and publicity mailing
lists, including their back-postings archives.  All of those mailing
lists' posting addresses were redirected, via /etc/aliases entries, to
the new Volunteers list Bill established at the time.  Some of those were
effectively dead and their archives useless, but web-team was the
working forum of the webmasters, and the speakers archive (although the
list was then inactive) had a great deal of valuable information.  As
head of the Web Team, I strongly protested the nuking of my team's
information archive.  Bill promised to provide its contents to me
(although not to recreate the mailing list), but then failed to do so
despite several reminders, and basically told me he didn't think I'd
sufficiently proven that it was worth his time.  (Much later, it emerged
that he had absolutely no idea how to provide the requested file.)
After about a month, I figured out how to get a copy of the archive by
myself, despite Bill and Paul carefully ensuring that nobody besides
themselves had any administrative access, any more.

After Bill and Paul left office, and the remaining volunteers finally
regained sufficient administrative access to do their jobs, I checked
with the new administration and then resurrected the web-team mailing
list (purging spam from the back postings).  I also resurrected a
reference, read-only archive of the former speakers mailing list.  And,
last, I re-pointed the webmaster e-mail address back to web-team.

There are a number of other "role" e-mail addresses remaining, other
than webmaster.  Handlers for all of those are in /etc/aliases, saying
where mail arriving for those addresses should go.  In almost all cases,
the redirect address is volunteers at lists.svlug.org, i.e., here.  Any
such posting would automatically get held by Mailman for listadmin
approval (in the admin queue), because of being "implicitly addressed"
to Volunteers.

I believe that was exactly what happened with Peter Blair's mailing.  He
almost certainly did not actually addresss it to
"volunteers at lists.svlug.org", but to one of the half-dozen or so "role"
e-mail addresses advertised here and there as points of contact for
SVLUG.  Therefore, I'm sure he's correct when he says he didn't realise
"this" was a distribution list.  In fact, I suspect he's puzzled about
the mail reaching volunteers at lists.svlug.org at all, because he
addressed it to a different mailbox entirely.


To reiterate, all of the above is intended as background explanation.
It is _not_ a request that any Volunteers member suggest solutions to
the "problem", because I am not in fact either describing a problem nor
asking help with it.  Nor am I asking anyone's opinion whether what I or
anyone else is doing is "OK".  What I'm doing is describing, pro bono
publico, how things work around here.

(I mention that because, several times in the past, I've described
something on our systems, or some action I've taken as
sysadmin/listadmin, and half a dozen Volunteers subscribers immediately
chirped up with either their offhand opinions that what I was doing was
"OK", or with solutions to the "problem" -- when in fact I'd been
neither seeking authorisation/praise nor posing a "problem", but rather
trying to explain what's going on so that more than one person has a
clue about our operations.)