Re: Dodgy Looking Subscribers to List.

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Ralph,

Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> In the same way the Mailman admin aren't keen on having spam emails pile
> up, I thought they may not appreciate subscriptions from one address to
> many lists, upping the count of emails sent, when it's probable the
> subscriber is a non-declared bot.  If that was true, but no automatic
> monitoring is in place, then I thought pointing out some recent
> subscribers who may have subscribed to other lists too might be helpful.

Spam on the lists affects the usability of them.  Keeping spam off to
keep the mailing lists usable to the readers is a primary goal.

Spam piling up and queuing negatively affects the servers.  And
affects our ability to manage the lists.  We can't have endless spam
clogging up the servers.  We would not be able to use the web
interfaces for example if they had thousands of spams in them.  And
yes, we have had mailing lists that were in that sad state.  So that
must be managed for the admin users.

For the most part we don't monitor subscribers of the open mailing
lists at all.  Mailman itself will monitor bounces.  As long as the
mail transfers and does not queue up then nothing happens.  But if the
address bounces too often then Mailman will remove the address due to
too many bounces.  And in that way it is a fairly automated system for
handling subscribers and we let things run mostly unattended.

> No, lurkers are welcome.  It's a low-volume list and we can have a
> lurker who has been silent for years suddenly post, causing me to clear
> their moderated flag.  The software dates to the 1970s.  Even one of its
> authors is still subscribed.  :-)

Cool! :-)

Bob