Mailing List Question

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

I just sent in this email and it will appear immediately in the list.

Somewhat earlier, I have submitted a 25kb patch and then a 5kb gzipped
version of that patch to -hackers and -patches - it has not yet appeared on
the list.

What's going on? Do posts with patches need to be approved or something???

My guess is that there is some delay for large patches to be approved.
The problem is I never get an email stating it is queued up, though I
think others do get such emails.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

OK, but should posters get email stating it is in the approval queue?
He clearly didn't, and I don't either, but others say they do get such
messages.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

OK, but should posters get email stating it is in the approval queue?
He clearly didn't, and I don't either, but others say they do get such
messages.

Not necessarily if it's an admin command.

Vince.
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Vince Vielhaber wrote:

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

OK, but should posters get email stating it is in the approval queue?
He clearly didn't, and I don't either, but others say they do get such
messages.

Not necessarily if it's an admin command.

istm that we should disable all administrative functions from the main
mailing lists (this is settable in the configuration). the -request
addresses handle administration, and it is just plain confusing to find
that there are some special words that should never be mentioned in the
subject or body of a message. That isn't appropriate behavior for those
mailing lists!

- Thomas

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

OH MY GOD!!!

I've always has this suspicion that every time I send an email with 'SET
NULL' in the subject it doesn't get through!!! I've even commented on that
on the list before!

Now it looks like I was right!

Marc - I suggest killing all those 3 patch mails I sent and I will resubmit
the email without 'set' in the header..

Chris

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

OH MY GOD!!!

I've always has this suspicion that every time I send an email with 'SET
NULL' in the subject it doesn't get through!!! I've even commented on that
on the list before!

Now it looks like I was right!

Marc - I suggest killing all those 3 patch mails I sent and I will resubmit
the email without 'set' in the header..

The fact this is done silently is clearly unacceptable.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:

Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:

I've always has this suspicion that every time I send an email with 'SET
NULL' in the subject it doesn't get through!!! I've even commented on that
on the list before!

The fact this is done silently is clearly unacceptable.

Agreed. Curiously, though, I've always gotten notifications whenever
any of my messages got held up for moderator approval. Seems like there
are two questions for Marc here:

1. Why is the system failing to notify some people about their messages
being delayed?

2. Shouldn't the filter patterns be tightened up considerably? For
example, I consider it sheer folly that I cannot use the word "c*ncel"
in a Postgres discussion group without my posting being held up for
several days.

regards, tom lane

The fact this is done silently is clearly unacceptable.

Agreed. Curiously, though, I've always gotten notifications whenever
any of my messages got held up for moderator approval. Seems like there
are two questions for Marc here:

1. Why is the system failing to notify some people about their messages
being delayed?

I get moderator notifications if I post to -general (to which I am not
subscribed)

Chris

The fact this is done silently is clearly unacceptable.

Agreed. Curiously, though, I've always gotten notifications whenever
any of my messages got held up for moderator approval. Seems like there
are two questions for Marc here:
1. Why is the system failing to notify some people about their messages
being delayed?

I get moderator notifications if I post to -general (to which I am not
subscribed)

imho we should disable *any* special handling of posts to the mailing
lists. Majordomo (at least the 1.x series) can be configured to respect
command keywords only for the xxx-request management lists, and to
ignore command keywords in the corresponding working lists.

fwiw, I got bit by this myself when setting up a couple of small mailing
lists at home. Very annoying, and very unexpected.

- Thomas

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@fourpalms.org> writes:

imho we should disable *any* special handling of posts to the mailing
lists.

It would be interesting to try that for awhile and see if the cure is
worse than the disease or not. How many clueless "uns*bscr*be" requests
will hit the lists if there are no filters?

I suspect that we need to settle on a happy medium. What we've got now
seems to be very far over on the "filter 'em first and sort it out later"
end of the spectrum. The "no filter at all" end of the spectrum has its
own obvious drawbacks (though I've used it successfully for >10 years
on another mailing list that I run).

If we could reduce the occurrence of false blocks by a factor of 10 or
100, at the price of maybe one or two misdirected administrative
requests per month hitting the lists, I'd consider it a great tradeoff;
and I'd have to think that it'd reduce Marc's moderation workload a lot,
too. Maybe that's an overoptimistic assessment --- Marc probably knows
better than any of the rest of us what fraction of messages stopped by
the filters are good traffic and what are not. But it sure seems like
the system is not optimally tuned at the moment.

regards, tom lane

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

2. Shouldn't the filter patterns be tightened up considerably? For
example, I consider it sheer folly that I cannot use the word "c*ncel"
in a Postgres discussion group without my posting being held up for
several days.

I was wondering if we could in the meantime get a list of patterns that
are causing mail delays, to help people avoid using them. I've tried to
post to this list (the same message) going on five or six times now, and
it doesn't go through. I'm now wondering if the problem is in the subject
line. I guess if this post goes through, I'll know :)

j

---
"Users complain that they receive too much spam, while spammers protest
messages are legal." -InfoWorld
"You do not have to do everything disagreeable that you have a right to
do." -Judith Martin (Miss Manners)

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

Vince Vielhaber wrote:

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

checking the moderator-to-approve listing for you, here are the reason(s):

Reason: GLOBAL ADMIN HEADER: /^subject:\s*set\b/i matched "Subject: SET"

OK, but should posters get email stating it is in the approval queue?
He clearly didn't, and I don't either, but others say they do get such
messages.

Not necessarily if it's an admin command.

istm that we should disable all administrative functions from the main
mailing lists (this is settable in the configuration). the -request
addresses handle administration, and it is just plain confusing to find
that there are some special words that should never be mentioned in the
subject or body of a message. That isn't appropriate behavior for those
mailing lists!

I can do this ... it would just mean ppl erroneously sending
subscribe/unsubscribe messages to the list(s) will actually get through
...

Anyone disagre with this change?

On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@fourpalms.org> writes:

imho we should disable *any* special handling of posts to the mailing
lists.

It would be interesting to try that for awhile and see if the cure is
worse than the disease or not. How many clueless "uns*bscr*be" requests
will hit the lists if there are no filters?

To be honest, not many ... 50% of what I have to moderate are plain and
simply spam (and that isn't an exaggeration, I wiped out something like
150 out of 350 messages the other day) ... maybe about 25% are duplicate
postings ... I'd say <1% are subscribe/unsubscribe ... and the rest are
mostly from ppl not subscribed to the lists at all ...

Let me disable the administrative stuff being blocked and we'll see if it
makes much of a difference in the way of 'false traffic' ...

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@fourpalms.org> writes:

imho we should disable *any* special handling of posts to the mailing
lists.

It would be interesting to try that for awhile and see if the cure is
worse than the disease or not. How many clueless "uns*bscr*be" requests
will hit the lists if there are no filters?

To be honest, not many ... 50% of what I have to moderate are plain and
simply spam (and that isn't an exaggeration, I wiped out something like
150 out of 350 messages the other day) ... maybe about 25% are duplicate
postings ... I'd say <1% are subscribe/unsubscribe ... and the rest are
mostly from ppl not subscribed to the lists at all ...

Let me add that I have looked at some non-pg lists and it looks terrible
to see spam in there, right in the archives. Marc's manual review is
clearly keeping our list of a high quality. Removing the admin keyword
blocks should fix most of our problems.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

...

Let me disable the administrative stuff being blocked and we'll see if it
makes much of a difference in the way of 'false traffic' ...

Great! Thanks Marc.

- Thomas

Uh, just to confirm: you are removing administrative blocks, and also
removing any scanning of messages for administrative commands, right? So
if someone want something administrative done, they *have* to use the
-request form of address?