Address to reach human operator regarding problems with list?
Ian Smith
smithi at nimnet.asn.au
Wed May 30 18:33:36 UTC 2012
In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 417, Issue 4, Message: 26
On Wed, 30 May 2012 06:31:38 -0400 "Thomas Mueller" <mueller23 at insightbb.com> wrote:
[Matthew Seaman wrote:]
> > freebsd-questions-owner at ... is correct, except that to my knowledge
> > there isn't really a moderator for freebsd-questions (it's an open list
> > that anyone can post to without having to be a member) and that address
> > ultimately gets dealt with by postmaster at freebsd.org.
'Ultimately' being operative; I gather it rather depends on workload.
It does sound a little odd that writing to freebsd-questions-owner@ is
interpreted as mail to a subs-only list (moderators@), which may be well
down the TODO queue of the postmaster@ team.
> > The message you got about "held for moderation" is standard boiler-plate
> > from mailman, and probably not appropriate for your specific circumstances.
I think mentioning the whole circumstance to postmaster@, including the
result of posting to freebsd-questions-owner@ could be worthwhile; I
wouldn't suggest every little mail issue should go to postmaster@, but
apart from Tom's immediate problem, there may be a functional issue.
> > On the whole though, you shouldn't need to contact anyone about the
> > warning you received. It generally occurs when your mail system
> > rejects messages from the freebsd-questions at ... list as spam. As there
> > is a certain amount of spam that does appear on the list, this is an
> > absolutely legitimate practice: trouble is, it's hard for the FreeBSD
> > mail system to distinguish deliberate non-acceptance of spam from
> > accidental non-acceptance of traffic due to a broken mailer.
Indeed. Considering the number of lists and the number of subscribers,
I think mailman (and spamassassin recipes) do a great job, though it's
always going to be a battle chasing the latest spammer techniques; the
recent spamruns with multiple 'From:' addresses being a case in point,
not a pretty look seeing spam 'apparently' by FreeBSD committers ..
> > Mailman has an adaptive system that scores you based on how many rejects
> > you generate in a certain time period. If you log into mailman at eg.
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/options/freebsd-questions
> > you can see your current score. Mine is currently 2.0 (out of 5.0) and
> > has been about that for quite some time. So long as your score is not
> > too large, I wouldn't worry about the message you received. Even if
> > your score does go over the threshold, you can just use that same
> > interface to re-enable delivery.
I hadn't checked for ages, but see my score is now 1.0, probably from a
couple of days downtime last month ie delayed delivery. This would help
Tom see if mailman 'knows' anything about his problem, but not what was
happening to cause that?
> I contacted my Internet service provider, Insight Cable, about the
> problem, and they need a copy of any message that bounces, so they
> can see what went awry.
Bit strange asking you to provide copies of messages you didn't get :)
Are they providing your inbound MX server, ie is that where your mail is
received? I gather you're not running your own mailserver. It should
not be hard to find any such bounces from/to mx2.freebsd.org in their
mail or spam logs, if it was they who bounced them? If not, who did?
> So I can't just ignore the problem.
I rather suspect that even if each bounce is logged at freebsd.org (and
it might be some task to find yours, beyond that they've been counted),
that it could be non-trivial to locate the offending source messages.
Not impossible, Message-IDs are likely logged, but last-resort stuff.
OTOH this may be something postmaster@ does routinely, what do I know :)
> Maybe I should resend the message to postmaster at freebsd.org instead
> of freebsd-questions-owner at freebsd.org?
>
> This problem relates to FreeBSD emailing lists in general, not just
> one list such as questions@ .
Yes, in this case I think you should, after exploring the options
Matthew outlined. Be sure to show complete headers of any and all
messages you need to forward to postmaster at .
cheers, Ian
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