Re: mailman keeps holding for non-subscribers

[Bob Proulx]

Eric Wong wrote:
> Hello Savannah admins,

Mailing lists have little to do with Savannah.  I have CC'd the
address@hidden list with this response.  That's the place to talk
about all things related to Mailman and the GNU mailing lists.
Savannah is all about the software source forge.

> It seems every few months I need to login to the Mailman admin
> interface and change the `generic_nonmember_action' option to
> "Accept" postings for non-subscribers.
>
> Is there some cronjob or upgrade which keeps flipping that
> option to "Hold"?

I am not aware of any automated process which does that.  However that
is the standard configuration for new mailing lists.  It's a good
configuration.  It is the recommended configuration.  But if you
change it as far as I know nothing will fight you over it.

This is described in some detail here.

  https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/ListHelperAntiSpam/

The normal thing is that the listhelper cancel-bot will receive the
moderation notices, deduce messages that are spam, automatically
discard those spam messages from the hold queue.  The anti-spam is
conservative as a false positive is worse than a false negative.
Remaining spam is discarded by the listhelper team.  We roll up all of
the 1500+ lists as a collection.

Additionally any non-spam messages are also approved by the human
team, and their senders either unmoderated or whitelisted.  This
results in the avoidance of spam to the mailing lists while at the
same time avoiding delays in posting as only the initial contact is
held for moderation.  This has been necessary because spammers
routinely subscribe and then post spam.  Therefore we moderate new
addresses as they appear.

The resulting process means that as a general statement project
mailing lists need no explicit maintenance.  If you as a project
maintainer and also a maintainer of the mailing list do nothing then
everything happens as needed anyway.  You are however free to be as
involved in the mailing lists as you want.

> The list in question is address@hidden

I don't recall any interaction with that mailing list.  It doesn't
ring a bell with me.

> I don't want to force users to subscribe to the mailing list to
> post(*).

Agreed.  How is that statement related to generic_nonmember_action set
to Hold?  Seems unrelated.

We never want to require people to subscribe to post bug reports or
other messages.  The GNU mailing lists are open mailing lists.  Can
you imagine requiring someone to subscribe in order to post a bug
report?  That would be inconvenient enough to drive most bug reporters
away.

Although some maintainers have made subscription a requirement for
their project mailing lists.  It goes against our recommendation and
guidelines.  I strongly recommend against it.

> In my case, it was myself since I've been changing email
> addresses because of the uncertainty around being able to afford
> .org down the line.

I will guess that you changed your email address, your first message
sent to the mailing list was therefore new and never before seen, it
was held for moderation.  Is that the issue here?

Bob