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

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> 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).

Just to expand on that:  Through the middle 1990s, most mailing list
administrators were in denial about the spam problem.  _Many_ mailing
lists were left completely open to non-subscribed posting through the
late 1990s.  They were clobbered with spam, the archives essentially
unreadable, and people unsubscribed in droves.  (The same thing happened
to wikis that didn't require login, except where there are strong
policing measures to detect and reject comment spam.)

One of the mailing lists that was essentially destroyed by this was the
SVLUG Web-Team mailing list.  When I took over the mailing lists in the
2000s, that is one that had been essentially abandoned to junk.  I
manually cleaned up its archives, and changed its acceptance policy to
hold for approval anything arriving from a non-subscribed address.
(Then as now, it is where any mail arriving to 'webmaster at svlug.org'
lands.  It had been left completely 'open' to non-subscribed senders to
facilitate communication to the webmasters from anyone without prior
arrangement.  Real-life concerns had made this impractical.)

The Volunteers mailing list suffers the same potential problem but was
never left fully 'open' because of our understanding of the problem
based on experience elsewhere such as web-team at lists.svlug.org .


In case you were wondering, on _all_ of SVLUG's mailing lists, we've
switched off Mailman's default 'Your message from a non-subscribed
address has been held for listadmin approval' auto-notices to claimed
sending addresses, which advisories in general cause more harm than good
(including backscatter spam).