Hi,

Thanks for the quick response!

On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 4:19 PM Stelian Ionescu <sionescu@cddr.org> wrote:

Hi,

Daily, my mailbox is bombarded with mails reminding me to moderate mailing list traffic on common-lisp.net. On occasion I have acted on these messages, if I saw one come by where genuine traffic was held. Most of the time, they are mails trying to sell eBikes and other junk, though. While I haven't acted much on them, they do present distraction, both of genuine mail traffic as well as in my mind. I want to remove that distraction.

Aren't messages directed to mailing lists going through a spam filter ? You could configure filters to drop any message that scores above 10 (which is IMO quite conservative).

They should be. Not really sure why they aren't being discarded. For most of the items in the queue the logs are long gone (we retain only a few weeks of logs for privacy reasons).

Out of curiosity, I picked the last reminder I received this morning. It was from cells-devel@ . There are no moderators, which means that reminders go to the owners: Kenny Tilton and cl-net root@ (that is: Mark Evenson, Dave Cooper, Philipp Marek and me).

There is a list of 333 moderations waiting. Accumulated between August 2024 and today. Actual list traffic: 1 mail in 2020 (without response!) and the last one before that was from 2012.

The before-last reminder was to cffi-devel@. There 113 moderations are waiting. Last and before-last active mail threads (including replies) are from 2023 and 2021 respectively. Owner of the list are Luis Oliveira and root@; again, no moderators. Conclusion: Although not as bad as with cells, nobody is acting on these reminders for cffi-devel either.

The one before that: cl-opengl-devel@. Same story: 95 waiting moderations, most recent mail threads from 2022 and 2020.

So, I see the following options (other than adding mail filters which simply delete these things on my side):

1. Remove root@ from the list of owners -- which presumably means root@ can't help with admin tasks for these mailing lists anymore

This should be done.

Ok. I did that. root@ isn't a co-owner of any of the lists anymore.

2. Copy the owners - excluding root@ - to the moderators so the flow to root@ stops
This should be done too.

Without root@ in the list of owners, I think the effect is the same: without moderators configured, moderation mails go to the owners.

3. Forcibly set mailing lists to drop non-member posts - the current default seems to be to hold for moderation
I don't know if it can be readily done, but I like how Google Groups work: trusted emails can post to any group without needing to subscribe (which is only for receiving emails from the list). For c-l.net, that could be the list of emails registered in the Gitlab instance, and possibly the list of emails subscribed to other lists as well.

This isn't straight forward. Moderators can select to add mail addresses to the list of "nonmembers" -- a group of mail addresses which *are* able to post to the list, even though they're not subscribed. The configuration I was talking about was the *default* nonmember post action, which is triggered for not-yet-registered-as-nonmember mail addresses.

Another idea is to automatically drop messages that are in the moderation queue for more than 365 days. I believe Mailman 2 used to do that.
Additionally, we could archive (remove submission possibility) for mailing lists which haven't received a single post for more than 5(?) or 7(?) or ... years.
I don't think this is necessary.

Lets not do that for now then.

I'll ask one of the others to have a look at what happened with the spam filter.

Bye,

Erik.

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