[balug-admin] (forw) Re: (moderation, job postings, etc.)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):

> Might we want to tweak the configuration so the "nag" e-mails only
> go out at most once per day?

Unfortunately, I know of none.  There's an option of enabling or
suppressing immediate notice of pending _subscribe_ requests (for
mailing lists requiring listadmin approval on join requests), such that
those are sent only in the daily reminder batch.  Or you might be
thinking of the digest mode option for _list_ mail sent to subscribers
-- as distinct from moderation-needed (nagmail) notices to
listadmins/moderators.

We could set "Discard held messages older than this number of days. Use
0 for no automatic discarding." to something other than the zero
default -- say, to one day.  That would lose most spam, at the risk of
occasionally discarding something legitimate.

The above is a poor remedy, attempting to partially compensate for
Dreamhost being basically pretty incompetent at its task of spam-rejection 
at the MTA level.  Just to clarify:  That is not a complaint, but I
think it's helpful to recognise the fact, if only to clarify what
exactly Michael's talking about:  Most people reading balug-admin will
be unaware of this, but the listadmins are called upon to "moderate"
some 15-20 held non-subscriber postings per day, aimed at each of our
mailing lists, essentially all of those being spam (mostly Japanese).

I personally do a _much_ better job of spam-rejection at my own MTA, and
nobody's paying me for that.  Dreamhost is screwing up the same task by
the numbers, and this is an important (if difficult) part of their _job_.

BALUG is currently, via its moderation messages and spam sent directly
to Mailman *-owner and *-bounces mailboxes, the second biggest source of
spam in my life, vying for first place with Bay Area FreeBSD User
Group's Mailman addresses (a group for which I also do listadmin duty).