Subject: Some notes on mailman lists

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 18:44:10 -0800

hi,

I think some people may not know everything about running lists under 
Mailman (I'm sure I don't!)
Still - some hints that I've found useful......

- The secretariat runs Mailman 2.0. If your list is currently under 
Majordomo, it should be simple to ask the secretariat to move it to Mailman.
- You can choose to send nonsubscriber mail to the moderator, or to send it 
to the list. The flag is called "Restrict posting privilege to list 
members", and you set it under "Privacy Options".
- On the same page, you can also set whether the list name must appear in 
the headers - this filters some spam too. If your list is known by multiple 
names, you have to list them all, though.
- Under "General options", you can set the max size of messages sent to the 
list (in Kb). Most virii are > 100 Kbytes.

Unfortunately, there are few things you can do to get obvious spam thrown 
away rather than sent to the moderators; a script for running spamassassin 
on the held messages was posted here some time ago, but I don't know who 
has managed to make it work for them. (I have it working, but not with the 
IETF-hosted lists....)

Share information! And have fun!

                     Harald

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From: Danny McPherson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 20:21:59 -0700

On Sunday, October 26, 2003, at 07:44 PM, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> - You can choose to send nonsubscriber mail to the moderator, or to 
> send it to the list. The flag is called "Restrict posting privilege to 
> list members", and you set it under "Privacy Options".

We've been doing this few a couple of years now.  Though it's
a pain sifting through the crude it's kept our list pretty much
spam free.

One thing to note is that you'll probably need to explicitly
permit messages from IESG, IAB, rfc-editor, your ADs, etc..
For example, here's what pwe3's exception post list currently
looks like:

[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

Plus a few miscellaneous lurkers that primarily employ archives
rather than subscribing.

-danny

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From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 22:53:42 -0500 (EST)

> Plus a few miscellaneous lurkers that primarily employ archives

Actually, Mailman provides a mechansim that can be used by people who want
to post from a different address, or who use archives rather than
receiving mail directly.  If you set the "nomail" flag on a subscriber
(under "Membership Management"), they will continue to be allowed to post,
but will not actually receive any messages.  This is particularly useful
because subscribers can set it themselves on the "Edit Options" page.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[email-masked]>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA