[NCUC E-team] Mailing list management

[William Drake]

Thanks much Tapani.  Is there anyone here who’d have the bandwidth to handle this, or share handling this with someone else?

Bill

On Dec 15, 2013, at 8:25 AM, Tapani Tarvainen <ncuc at TAPANI.TARVAINEN.INFO> wrote:

> 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
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