Re: lists that drop nonmember mail [was gnu-misc-discuss broken?]

[Karl Berry]

Hi Ian,

    Anyone on this mailman list. What do you think should be done about
    this issue?

-- For those lists which use listhelper:

Option 1: just setting generic_nonmember_action to hold should be ok
technically. I doubt many list owners will complain, or even notice,
though some surely will.

Of course it would be polite to write to the list owners saying that it
has been done, but that's a lot of work.

Option 2: even more work: write to the list owners in advance of doing
anything, and ask them if they don't mind us changing it.  (I would not
bother to ask *them* to change it -- that's a 98% sure recipe for
inaction, in my experience.)

-- For lists which don't use listhelper: we shouldn't just switch it to
hold since nothing will be looking at the incoming msgs.  GNU packages
really should not be discarding nonmember posts (it's in the coding
standards/maintainer information); of course we could (offer to)
(re)instate listhelper for the lists.  But for nongnu packages, I guess
it's legitimately up to the list owners.

Just contacting the list owners at all is nontrivial, as the listed
addresses in mailman are often stale.

I contacted list owners about this and other issues for years, until I
just got tired of it and needed to spend my time doing other things.  So
I can't volunteer to be the one to push this through, sorry.

Of course, another option (the most efficient one :) is to do nothing.
The list situation never has been perfect, and never will be perfect, so
we could just accept that other things have higher priority and let it go.
It's up to you, really ...


This seems like a good time to mention two of the scripts in ~list/bin
on lists: dumpallconf and lists2do. dumpallconf dumps all the mailman
list configurations into /home/list/tmp/dumpallconf. I run it
irregularly, maybe once a month. (It takes hours to run.)

lists2do reads that output, among other things, and tries to report on
various problems in the configurations, including
generic_nonmember_action being anything but hold. The output is in
/home/list/tmp/2do.out, and it starts like this:

443 linphone-developers false     
261 www-zh-cn-hackers false     
185 gmediaserver-devel false     
..

That number is the size of the hold queue, and the "false" means
listhelper is not enable. The hold queues get that huge because those
list owners either explicitly told us they don't want listhelper, or
because they are for non-English lists, which listhelper cannot handle
well. And in either case, obviously the list owners are not taking care
of the incoming messages. 

There are various things that could be done, starting with talking to
the list owners, but again, there's never enough time to do everything ...

Best,
Karl