[volunteers] Upcoming listadmin downtime

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Weisler (mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us):

> Yes, I'm still up for it.

For other people's information:  I caused Mailman to send Mark an
"invite" message for mailing list mailman-owner, with the following
prepended text:


Mark, assuming you still know the listadmin password, membership in this
mailing list ("mailman-owner") is all you need.  To clarify:

1.  Being subscribed to mailman-owner, with delivery enabled, results in
your receiving the "listadmin action needed" nagmails that inform you of
something waiting in the admin queues of our various mailing lists.

2.  Possessing the listadmin password makes it possible for you to visit
the admin queues and approve held postings in them (among other actions
you can take).

Almost all held messages will be spam.  Moreover, their spammy nature
will almost always be obvious from their sending addresses and/or
(especially) Subject lines.  You can ignore anything that looks as if it
is spammy, and not even bother visiting the admin queue to examine them
closely.  Held messages get autodeleted from the queue, after a few
days.

Thus, all that really happens without a listadmin on duty is that, once
in a blue moon, a message that should have been approved, instead,
expires out of the queue and is discarded -- which actually isn't a big
tragedy.

On every mailing list except Volunteers, Web-Team, and Jobs, the best
thing to do to non-spam held mail is reject it (return to sender) with a
polite note saying why it was rejected -- which almost always is either
1. sending from a non-subscribed address, 2. "implicit addressing"
(Bcc'ing the list), 3. "too many recipients" = massive Ccing of
non-members, or 4. Message too large (some damnfool attachment).

Volunteers is a special case because it receives mail to several aliases
(president, speakers, etc.), which thus means we must manually approve
them if they're not crap.  Web-Team receives mail to "webmaster", which
is mostly crap but there are exceptions.  Jobs is unique in that all
mail is held, even from subscribed addresses.  Therefore, all legit
postings that follow the posted rules must be manually approved.  (Of
course, most held mail for it is spam.)