Thomas Krichel writes: > MegaBrutal via Mailman-users writes > > > Also I created my list as "Announce only", > > I ran mailman for donkeys' years for such a lists. Mailman is not > a good tool for such lists. It requires its subscribers to verify > their address. This is good policy for a discussion list, as you > want to handling of subscribers.
This is a good policy for *any* mailing list. There's a harassment technique where you sign up the target's email address for many lists, which is annoying at best, and can result in denial of service by overflowing the mailbox. Of course the verification email itself can be abused in the same way with a sufficiently large number of lists, but to the extent that there is not proliferation of list managers, email providers can recognize such attacks and mitigate them. > But this is added work for subscribers that you don't need them > to do. You don't need them to do that work. It's the victims of DOS attacks that need this work to be done. > The problem comes at signoff time. Folks forget they > registered. They need to find their credentials. If they don't > have them, they get annoyed and may mark your email as spam. Until RFC 8058, there wasn't a plausible technique to avoid this. (Also, I've seen a lot less bogus spam marking since the big freemail providers stopped making the "this is spam" button easier to find than the "delete" button about 15 years ago.) > That's one reason I wrote my own tool for such lists. It is undeniable that Mailman is not suitable for a large fraction of announce lists. It's also true that (except for the relatively recent RFC 8058 "Signaling One-Click Unsubscribe" protocol) all of your complaints could have been resolved in Mailman by 2020 (when Mailman 3 became mature and clearly dominant over Mailman 2 feature-wise) -- had someone who cared either done the work or funded its contribution. > repec.org and bims Biomed News. Here the same items are packaged > into potentially overlapping reports. Nipto features individual > emails to present the item only once to a subscriber. A good approximation to this using umbrella and sibling lists has been available in Mailman for something like 20 years. It probably also could be done with topics in Mailman 2 (but the topic feature was not implemented in Mailman 3 because there was no perceived demand). It's not easy to configure, but a better configuration tool could have been added to Mailman 2, and I think Mailman 3 could probably implement it as a style. I wouldn't be surprised if you could come up with a thread or two where such features were requested, and were WONTFIXed by the Mailman developers. They're not part of our core scope, and mostly were requested by people who were clearly interested in direct mail marketing which we don't want to be associated with, and you probably don't either. But if they were contributed or funded, they would very likely have been accepted. Especially if they could be implemented as a style configuring existing mail flow controls in Mailman, they'd almost certainly have been accepted. (And would be today.) Steve -- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan _______________________________________________ Mailman-users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://lists.mailman3.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.mailman3.org/ Archived at: https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/XUY7UIEGMNTTWWPBSXROBMQQ6BZVAMEL/ This message sent to [email protected]
