[gnu.org #1231740] gnu-misc-discuss broken?

[Ian Kelling via RT]

This issue is about list settings that list owners control and working
with them so I'm adding address@hidden list. If there is nothing
clearly for that the sysadmins need to implement when you reply, you can
leave off the address@hidden in your reply. I'm subscribed to the
mailman list, so I will see it.

On Wed Aug 16 09:04:17 2017, rms wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > Colby's message is now listed in the archive
>   > index. address@hidden was not a member of
>   > gnu-misc-discuss, so I've added him. He needed to be subscribed
>   > for the message to get through automatically.
>
> Thanks.
>
> I didn't realize that the list required subscription.
> It didn't require that in the past, when it was gatewayed
> to a newgroup.
>
> If the list is set up that way, it ought to send a failure
> message to anyone who tries to send and isn't subscribed.
> Maybe it failed to do that.  Please talk with the OP to see
> if that is the case.
>
> He said that no messages had arrived on the list since Aug 1.
> That suggests maybe something else is broken there too.
> Would you please see if that is so?
>
> Please report when done.
>
>

List is not broken.

I previously replied, to this, but you can ignore it. I wasn't thinking
things through enough.

Auto-reply can be a good thing. But there is a risk, because spoofed
sender causes us to send spam which can get us blacklisted and
generally increase the likelihood that messages from gnu.org caught in
spam filters.


>
> To silently reject person's mail is very bad treatment.  Other sites
> do not do this.  I often get failure messages when I sent to a list
> that requires subscription and I am not subscribed.
>
> What about our other mailing lists?  Do they all require subscription?
> Do they all silently drop mail from someone not subscribed?
>

First of all, based on my reading of that list's settings, the person in
your quote, and I was a little mistaken when we said a subscription was
required. For that list, subscribed and unsubscribed messages are
treated the same: the message won't go through right away. In mailman
terminology, the message is "held for moderation", and hopefully within
a few hours or a day, a moderator approves the message so it is sent to
the list, and adds the user to a whitelist so their future messages are
not held for moderation. There are 3 related list options which govern
this.

I've greped across 99% of advertised gnu.org lists:

What to do with posts from unsubscribed, not yet whitelisted addresses:
    16 generic_nonmember_action = 0  # accept post
   694 generic_nonmember_action = 1 # hold for moderation
      2 generic_nonmember_action = 2 # reject (aka bounce)
    49 generic_nonmember_action = 3 # discard (silently drop)

Do we auto respond to posts held for moderation to let people know that:
    757 respond_to_post_requests = false
      4 respond_to_post_requests = true

Do we hold subscribed posts for moderation until the poster is whitelisted:
    285 default_member_moderation = false
   476 default_member_moderation = true

I agree that respond_to_post_requests sounds like a good option if
someone is checking it regularly and disables it if it starts to become
heavily used for spam. However, I don't moderate any public lists, so
I'd like to hear what people with experience in this say.

Ideally, there should be mitigations against the risk of
spam that make it safer to turn that option on, like detecting if the
sender is has proven they aren't spoofed and some smart rate limiting
and such. There may be features for this in newer mailman versions.

generic_nonmember_action of discard is quite unfriendly, but if a list
states it in the list description, there are some valid reasons reasons
like being a invite only list, or for a list owner/moderator who wants
to avoid reading as much spam as possible by making everyone subscribe
first. However, I made a list of all the gnu.org lists with this option,
and most do not say that in the list description. Some have no list
description at all. At least some of them, we might want to ask their
owners to include this fact in the list description, change the option,
or retire the list, or simply do one of those. Here is all the lists
with that option:

https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-announce
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf-prs
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-acm
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-autogen
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-glpk
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnucap
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-jel
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-marst
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-mifluz
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-powerguru
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/commit-gnuradio
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/dominion-discuss
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-bidi
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-bug-tracker
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-france
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-france-eval
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-france-gpl
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-newsfr-en
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsffr-oppose
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfstatus
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gg-network
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/global-commit
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnats-diffs
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucap-devel
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnugo-announce
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/health-security
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-3dldf
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-acm
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-autogen
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-glpk
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnucap
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-jel
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-marst
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-3dldf
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnucap
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnunet
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libcvs-spec-dev
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/m4-announce
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/mifluz-dev
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/mit-scheme-announce
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/osip-dev
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-announce
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/radius-commit
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-projects-mentors
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social

--
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7  DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org