Re: Closed lists as maintainers
Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> writes:
> I hope we can agree that maintainers should be able to receive mail from
> any legitimate sender.
> However, some maintainer addresses point to mailing lists that
> automatically reject mail from non-subscribers (without the intervention
> of a moderator). The case I am painfully aware of is
> grub-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org, listed as the maintainer for grub
> and grub2.
> I believe this configuration is unacceptable, but would like to check
> that there is a consensus on this before pressing the matter with the
> GRUB maintainers.
I agree that automatic rejection is bad. I do think that holding for
moderation is okay.
The configuration that I use for pkg-shibboleth-devel is to automatically
allow any message with X-Debian-PR-Package or X-Debian: DAK in the headers
and then hold everything else from non-subscribers for moderation,
expiring messages after seven days, and disabling the moderation
notification messages to the sender. I then review every message held for
moderation through my own spam filters and go and approve anything that's
legitimate, whitelisting the sender at the same time. I set an expiration
time of 7 days for things in the moderation queue so that I don't have to
keep going in there and cleaning it out. I also always use discard for
things that time out or things that I reject.
This seems to minimize the annoying nag mail while still getting rid of
the spam (which, before I started doing this, caused several people to
constantly get unsubscribed from the list since their ISPs rejected spam
mail that Alioth let through).
I think it's particularly important to automatically let through BTS
messages (X-Debian-PR-Package) and messages from automated archive
processes. Spam from those sources is extremely low.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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