[NCUC E-team] Mailing list management

[Tapani Tarvainen]

Managing Mailman is perhaps the most important of the e-tasks
I listed, given how much NCUC work relies on email,
and it needs attention frequently and often rapid response.
On the other hand it's also very easy, technically anyone can
do it, the primary requirement is conscientiousness,
or reliability if you will.

It is also easy to share between several people in many
ways, but the very least there should be two people who
can do "everything", or at least one all-purpose admin
and one moderator. Different lists could have different
managers, now they're all managed by same people (I and
Wilson) and have same password (ncuc1:/root/mailman.passwd,
which Brenden can also access).

Mailing list management tasks are probably familiar enough,
but here's a quick summary with rough estimate of frequency:

(1) Allowing or disallowing messages held because of some rule.
Common situations are members using a different sender address than
the one they're subscribed with, too many Cc: addresses, too big
messages, cross-postings resulting in non-members posting, &c.
These happen weekly, sometimes more often, even several in one day,
and usually should be handled quickly (within the same day).

(2) Approving subscription requests. This is much less
frequent and tends to happen in bursts a couple of times a
year, especially the EC list after elections and the discuss
list after admitting new members, occasionally at other times,
like when someone changes their address.
(The EC list is exceptional in that unsubscribe also needs
moderator approval.)
And of course if working teams or the like start getting
more active using their lists they may increase this, but then
it might make sense to delegate subscription approvals to
whoever coordinates the team.

Mailman has distinct administrator and moderator roles,
moderator basically just doing the two tasks above, i.e.,
approving or disapproving messages and (un)subscriptions,
and it might well make sense to have, say, two administrators
for the lot and in addition moderator rights to others in
some lists (whenever someone complains about too slow
moderation in some list, offer to make them moderator...)

(3) Mass subscriptions. I'll mention this separately from
the above, as it cannot be done with the moderator password
and is technically somewhat different. Not difficult though,
usually it's simply cut'n'pasting list of addresses.

(4) Creating new lists. Infrequent, never really urgent, easy.
The mail system has been set up to recognize new lists
automatically as long as they use addresses of the form
something at lists.ncuc.org, so all it takes is the Mailman list
creation form (http://lists.ncuc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/create) -
no need to worry about editing alias files or whatever various
documents talk about.

(5) Adjusting list settings, like maximum messages size &c.
Rare, usually only needed after list creation, but sometimes
needed to handle spam attacks or temporarily moderating some
list member who's gone crazy &c.

That's about it. There are also some list-related tasks that
I've omitted, but they're either one-off things that have been
done already (general mail system settings) or such that they
usually aren't done at all (like messing with archives), and
also technically belong to linux admin (cannot be done with
the web GUI).

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen