[Mailman-Users] Approve subscription requests via mail

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:48 PM +0100 11/18/06, Georg Sauthoff wrote:

>  (the take, take, take and leaching arguments are IMO a bit far fetched.

Basically, it comes down to a matter of trust.  The Gmane folks say 
that they operate by certain rules, and then we have multiple 
instances where they fail to operate by those rules.  If we can't 
trust them to operate by their own rules that they claim they always 
use, then how can we trust them with anything else?


I've spoken to Lars, and I'm convinced that he's a good guy.  In 
fact, I've had less problems with Lars than with a lot of people who 
use Gmane and insist that we allow our mailing lists to be served 
there.

But just because I believe that Lars is a good guy is not a 
sufficient justification for me to trust that the service will 
actually be operated according to the rules that they themselves have 
said that they are supposed to follow.

>  I am only talking about the left link. It is about 'good practice':

Who has defined this "good practice"?  I've been specializing in 
administering e-mail systems for well over a decade (including some 
of the largest e-mail systems on the planet), and I've helped set up 
the hardware and software for what were some of the largest mailing 
lists in existence, at least at the time.

I am not personally aware of anyone having defined any "best 
practice" that covers this situation, but if you can show me 
something that you have encountered, we can take a look at that and 
see how it might be applied.

>  At the page http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/docs.html  the authors
>  invite users to just mail to mailman-users@ ('Email Us' - left side,
>  like every left side ) and only 'suggest' to subscribe ('We suggest you
>  subscribe to the list first' - right side, 2nd paragraph).

Then it sounds like we should clarify the wording used around that 
link, which is something that Barry will have to do.

>  And sure you link to the searchable mail archive from the faq and
>  http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users, but not from
>  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/ (which is the first
>  place if I look for the searchable archives - of course then the faq
>  or directly via google).

I'll take a look at that and see if I can update the description.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>

Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org
mail forwarding service as of 15 November 2006.  If you have an old
e-mail account for me at this domain, please make sure you correct that
with the current address.