[volunteers] [svlug] Fwd: Speaking at SVLUG Oct 7th

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Sarah Newman (newmans at sonic.net):

> Nolan said his message never got posted to volunteers BTW. Is it set
> to automatically reject people who aren't on the mailing list?

Ah.  What that means is that I didn't notice it in the Mailman admin
queue in time, and it expired out.  I just checked
http://lists.svlug.org/lists/admindb/volunteers, and it's not there any
more.  Sorry about that, Nolan.

Volunteers is currently set to hold postings from non-subscribed
addresses for three days and then expire them out if not approved.  I'm
going to increase that to 5 days so that I'm less likely to miss
non-spam held mail.  The price of a long retention period is that the
retained mail will always be dozens of pieces of spam that the MTA could
not autoreject with only once in a blue moon something that isn't, and
long queues also put a greater burden on the host.

To answer your question directly, Volunteers is set to hold all mail
from non-subscribed sending addresses, like essentially all other
mailing lists in 2015 (because of the spam problem).  One trick we use
to make this handling more transparent is that, the first time an admin
manually approves a mail to Volunteers from any non-subscribed address
(such as nolan at cumulusnetworks.com), he/she checks a ticky box to also
add the sending address to the 'List [i.e., roster] of non-member
addresses whose postings should be automatically accepted' for that
mailing list.  Ergo, second and following postings from that person will
sail straight through even if he/she never subscribes.

I've just added  nolan at cumulusnetworks.com manually to that roster for
Volunteers.


When I say 'an admin', here in 2015 that basically means just me.
There's supposed to be a whole team of people who get the held-mail
notices, but all of them have faded away at this point except yr.
present servant.

I _try_ to eyeball the summary mails of held SVLUG mail, especially for
Volunteers, given that that's our public point of contact for quite a
few purposes.  The summary mails list the Subject headers and senders of
all held mail.  Generally, it's really obvious when one such mail has
some likelihood of being non-spam, hence worth looking at more closely.
On rare occasions, their non-spamicity doesn't stand out clearly enough
_or_ I've mass-deleted notices for three days in a row without
eyeballing the full message text.

With today's change, I'll have five days to notice (at the cost of
getting longer summaries of almost all spam).