[volunteers] Mail list monitoring

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Held mail on SVLUG's other (non-Jobs) mailing lists should basically
> never be approved:  I can't at the moment imagine an exception.  

Well, two minutes after writing that, I thought of one.

_This_ mailing list (Volunteers) is where a lot of the "role" contact
e-mail addresses currently land, such as "president at svlug.org",
speakers@, etc.  So, the admin queue for Volunteers sometimes snags
incoming legitimate mail from outside parties who are trying to contact
SVLUG, and where we _do_ want to hear from them.  It's a judgement call 
about which ones to approve, because we also get all kinds of other
rubbish, including generic-IT press releases of no Linux interest and no
LUG relevance.  Here's a note I post a couple of months ago, about
something I let through:


  Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2009 12:00:40 -0700
  From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
  To: volunteers at lists.svlug.org
  Subject: Re: [volunteers] Linux Training Discounts
  Organization: Dis-


  Just a comment on this posting (that I just approved) from an
  unsubscribed address:  I approved it despite it being addressed like
  this:

    From: Francesca Krylowicz <francesca.krylowicz at dlt.com>
    To: Francesca Krylowicz <francesca.krylowicz at dlt.com>

  In other words, this was a broadcast e-mail Francesca probably sent to a
  large number of LUGs' contact addresses, with the real addressees in
  Bcc: lines.

   I approved the post because it is non-spam and has LUG relevance, but
   neither recommend nor disrecommend her firm's (DLT Solutions, Inc.'s)
   group-discount offer.  FWIW, training/certification firms seem to offer
   group discounts very widely.

You can be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.  If you let a
particular incoming contact e-mail get discarded, someone might accuse
you of censoring SVLUG's incoming mail.  If you approve it, somebody
else might bitch that you're approving "spam":  The latter happened 
some months ago when I decided to approve a mail to (dunno, probably)
"president at svlug.org" letting SVLUG know about a local vendor selling
off some rackmount servers, and Luke S. Crawford complained that it was
"spam", because he didn't think the offers were good enough deals.  He
might have had a good point about value -- it's a debatable judgement -- 
but I replied citing my reasons for letting that one posting through.


Additionally, the web-team at lists.svlug.org is where any mail lands from
the mailto: links on our Web pages for "feedback to webmaster".  For
obvious reasons (address harvesting bots), most held mail to webmaster@ 
is spam, but a small amount is not, and should be approved if it tells
us anything we even arguably want to hear.  (That's how our membership
once in a blue moon tells us about broken links on our pages, for example.)