Hi everyone,
Quite a few things have happened in the last 18 months since the last
time we sent out a `bits from the listmasters', so here is your chance
to find out what you have been missing out on.
1. Debian white-list
Debian mailing lists are currently using something called
Cross-Assassin (CA) which checks to see how often a message has been
cross-posted.
To make this work, all messages that come from an
email address which is not subscribed to the list it is trying to
post to, and is not on the white-list gets delayed by at least 15
minutes. After 15 minutes, CA checks that the email has not been
cross-posted to other lists, and then lets the message
through. To bypass this, you can subscribe yourself to the Debian
white-list [1], which will allow your posts to go through
faster, and skip this particular check.
2. Spam
Despite popular misconceptions[2], the listmasters are not currently
injecting extra spam into the lists when we feel the spam level is
too low, and we have been trying to decrease the amount of spam
constantly. For an idea of how things are going there, murphy.d.o,
(our list server) is currently blocking over 60,000 emails a
day. Unfortunately, this is still not good enough as there is still
a fair amount of spam going onto the lists.
In the future, we hope that our upcoming move to faster hardware
will allow us to run more stringent anti-spam checks.
Special thanks go to Santiago Villa who has made a number of useful
suggestions, which have been quite helpful in reducing spam on Debian
lists.
3. New & changed lists
There's been a fair amount of changes since our last update:
debian-custom:
This list exists to help people working on CDD (Custom Debian
Distributions) to communicate better, and to ensure that
tools and procedures are shared.
debian-desktop:
This list can be used for discussions about the Debian Desktop
sub-project which is dedicated to improving the desktop
experience for Debian users.
debian-jobs:
This is a moderated announce list used to inform people of
Debian-related jobs that they might be interested in.
debian-kernel:
This list is used by the various Debian kernel maintainers to
co-ordinate their efforts, and for discussions related to
kernels in Debian.
debian-lsb:
This list is used for the discussion and coordination of
efforts towards ensuring that Debian meets the requirements of
the Linux Standard Base.
debian-qt-kde:
This is a development list used by the maintainers of Qt and
KDE packages, as well as related packages to discuss issues
relating to those packages.
debian-ruby:
This list is used by maintainers of ruby-related packages to
improve the ruby experience for Debian users, but also to
discuss issues faced by ruby-related packages.
debian-user-icelandic:
This list is for Icelandic users, developers and
translators.
debian-l10n-greek:
debian-l10n-hungarian:
debian-l10n-russian:
These lists are used by translators to translate Debian into
their respective languages as well as improving currently
existing translations.
debian-amd64:
Just to keep this email on topic ;-). This is actually the old
debian-x86-64 which was renamed back in August 2003.
debian-women:
This is our latest list, which is used by users and
developers for discussions and collaboration involving women
in Debian.
debian-chinese-big5:
debian-chinese-gb:
These two lists have also been revived after a long 6 months
where they were inactive. There are now a number of extra
moderators, and things are working much more smoothly.
If you wish to subscribe to any of those lists, simply head over to
http://lists.debian.org/<listname>, or email
<listname>-request@lists.debian.org with the subject subscribe.
4. Some numbers
There are now 169 lists, with 162,861 subscribed email addresses
(83886 of which are unique).
Debian-curiosa now has over 1000 subscribers.
Our list server is now attempting ~1,500,000 deliveries every day.
5. Misc
As you probably realise, there are a high number of lists, and we
can't monitor all of them constantly. This means that unless
someone alerts us when something is wrong, we might not immediately
notice it, even if we do try to be omniscient.
If you're going to email[3] us, there's a few things you can do to
ensure that we actually read it. Firstly, never bounce something to
us, but forward it instead, with an informative subject. Please
email us in English, as although we can deal with a couple of
western European languages, we can't tell if an email is ham or
spam if it's in chinese. Finally, if you haven't gotten a reply
from us in a few days, please try again, we've probably missed your
email.
If you do find that you are not able to subscribe to any lists and
that you are not getting any answers from the listmasters, please
make sure that you are not using a challenge-response program, and
that you have not blacklisted half the Internet.
Regards,
Pasc (with his listmaster hat on)
[1]: http://lists.debian.org/whitelist
[2]: Listmasters get an email almost every week (and sometimes more
often) informing us that we should consider implementing some
type of spam filter on Debian lists.
[3]: listmaster@lists.debian.org
--
Pascal Hakim
Do not bend.
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