[sf-lug] MEGA Invitation

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at well.com):

> You're correct as to the Mailman admin access.

'Correct' that only you (and I) have the admin password?
Then, we have a mystery.

> To manage our Mailman system, I respond to notices of messages waiting
> for approval (usually ignore less than a few, respond instantly to
> more than a dozen). The usual action is to drop (and delete) messages
> from unsubscribed email addresses.  This is the only action I've taken
> in the last many months.

Yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you about that, actually, so please
listen up.

I can save you a lot of trouble on that, _and_ prevent you from messing
up my system a bit, which is (sadly) all that you are accomplishing when
you do that.

In other words, I need you to stop the way you're doing it.


Here's the thing:  

You see notices.  Do any of them, based on the summaries you 
see in the notices, have even a prayer of a chance of being non-spam? 
Bear in mind, it's staggeringly uncommon for it to be anything but spam.
If 'no', then there's absolutely no reason for you to visit the admin
pages at all, that day.  And your going to the page _and_ processing all
of those spams manually, _and_ adding their probably-never-to-be-seen-again
forged senders to the to-be-discarded roster, clogged up my Mailman installation
with hundreds of garbage e-mail addresses.  Which is bad.

Let me back up.  I'll do a short version, and then a long version.


Short version:

1.  When you see admin notices, and it's obviously spam, take no action at
all.  Period.  The end.

2.  Don't add addresses to the to-be-discarded roster.  Period.  The end.

There.  I've just made your listadmin work a lot easier.   Much less to do.



Longer version:

Mailman is configured so that held spam expires out of the admin queue
after five days by itself.  So, please just let that happen for the most
part.  There is _zero_ point in your adding the (invariably forged,
usually nonexistent) claimed sending addresses of arrived spam to
Mailman's to-be-discarded roster.  All you're accomplishing is doing a
lot of pointless work, _and_ bogging down Mailman with bullshit non-data
to slow down its processing.

I just cleaned hundreds of machine-generated fake addresses, that you
laboriously put there, from the 'List of non-member addresses whose
postings will be automatically discarded' roster (to-be-discarded
roster, for short) on Privacy options, Sender filters.  Hundreds of
addresses mostly like these:  'alvpofa at shyilong.com',
'clmpdghll at jingcheng-china.com', 'collect at billingsaint.top',
'iris.lou4g at gmail.com', 'nbvivid at 163.com', 'ncl at hpxomrcy.org'.  

Really?  We're going to keep track of every single fake sending address
used to forge a spam, because we don't want another that's 'from' that
not-real address?  No, I really don't think so.

I've just cleared out all that rubbish, and I'm sure Mailman will be a
bit faster and more reliable for the cleanup.  Please don't resume doing
that.

Reasons to visit the admin queue:  (a) You think the description of one
of the mails is one of those borderline cases that _might_ not be spam
or fraudmail, or (b) you're pretty sure it's legitimate mail, e.g. from
a subscriber accidentally using an alternate (non-subscribed) sending
address, or a mail bigger than the 40kB maximum (why?)[1].  Either way, you
visit the page to have a closer look.  You examine those cases, and
either approve them or not.  After you're done ensuring that everything
else is junk, you go to the bottom of the page
(http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/admindb/sf-lug), _since you happen_ to be
there, check the checkbox marked 'Discard all messages marked Defer',
and hit 'Submit'.  The queue gets flushed, emptied.

Normally it wouldn't be worth your time to visit the admin queue 
(http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/admindb/sf-lug) just to flush the queue;
that happens automatically on a 5-day retention time.  Since you
_happen_ to be there to look at borderline cases, it's very little extra
trouble to also scroll to the bottom, check a checkbox, and hit a
button.

But what you've been doing has been (a) clogging up Mailman for no
benefit whatsoever, and (b) chewing up your time trying to outwork
spambots.  Any time you find yourself trying to manually outwork a bot,
something has gone wrong and you need to find a better workflow.



>     I'm still thinking that somehow Jason has in
> his local or personal cloud storage some of the
> SF-LUG email addresses.

You're missing the point.  This in no way resolves the mystery of how
a non-subscriber posting that arrived with an alleged sender of
'support at mega.nz' got approved for distribution.  That should not have
happened, and on the face of it would normally have been possible only
if the posting were manually approved by an administrator.  (It's utterly
irrelevant where Jason puts anything.)

You say you didn't.  I believe you.  But then who or what did it?