Since its origin a few months ago, the dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org list has been moderated, in an effort to keep spam out of the list.
The rules have been rather simple: mail sent by list members gets right through, the rest goes into a moderation queue where it is reviewed daily. The occasional on-topic message from a non-subscriber address gets manually passed through, and the rest is discarded. Spam filters (are intended to) recognize most spam and discard it outright, so that the moderator need not review hundreds of spams daily to find the occasional rare nuggets. Unfortunately, the moderation and spam filtering features of mailman 2.1.5 (the list management software used on lists.mozilla.org) is severely broken. Essentially, the spam filters fail to recognize and discard any spam. The only semi-effective anti-spam feature is the one that separates mail sent by subscribers from mail sent by non-subscribers. As moderator, my choices are: a) have ALL non-subscriber email go into the moderator queue, resulting in dozens to hundreds of emails to be reviewed daily, or b) have ALL non-subscriber email be silently discarded, resulting in NO emails to be reviewed daily. But even that feature is broken. Occasionally, mailman just starts treating ALL email as if it came from non-subscribers, putting it in the moderation queue, or discarding it, according to which choice (a or b) is then in effect. This has happened twice in 2006 to date, for several days each time. Choice b is desirable to the moderator, except for those cases where mailman starts handling all incoming mail as if from non-subscribers. When that happens, and option b is in effect, all incoming email is silently discarded without any copy being kept. I've tried it both ways, and the moderation burden is simply too high with choice a. So, effective immediately, choice b is (once again) in effect. As moderator, I'm going to have to rely on you, the list membership, to help me discover the times when mailman is discarding all incoming email, so I can kick it again. If you are a list subscriber, and you send a message, and you don't receive a copy of your own message within an hour or two, please send an email to the list moderator. Then when I've kicked it, you'll need to resend your email to the list. Sorry. I wish we had better list tools at our disposal. But alas. /Nelson B (moderator) _______________________________________________ dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
