Postmaster guidelines
From Blitzed
This page is intended to serve primarily as a guide to Postmasters on dealing with mailing list messages requiring moderation. It might also be helpful for anyone trying to figure out what might've happened to something they sent to a ...@lists.blitzed.org address.
[edit] What to do
Generally:
- Deal with legitimate posts/anything weird that isn't spam
- Confirm spam with spamassassin on nubian before discarding it
[edit] Non-spam stuff
Messages will generally be held for moderation because they've been sent from addresses that aren't subscribed to the particular list. If the message has gone to the appropriate list, approve the message and add the sender to the allow filter list.
A fascinating majority of messages, however, seem to be sent to random lists (often admins, web or opm). Redirect messages by discarding them, and forwarding a copy to the appropriate list:
- BOPM questions should go to bopm@
- Anything else to do with open proxy monitoring, opm@
- Anything to do with the blitzed.org website, web@
- Questions about the network itself, admins@
- IRC use/help... help@
- ...and so on. Use common sense and your own judgement.
Discard messages that provide no clear purpose (like asking for help) or in a language other than english (chances are nobody appropriate is going to be able to read it).
List subscriptions are manually managed by administrators - discard subscription requests.
[edit] Spam
We run spamassassin. Report spam to it by running a script on nubian. Nicely ask a services person to add an account for you if you need it, and sudo access to the script. Run the script with:
-bash-2.05b$ sudo ~mailman/bin/mmlearn bopm
...substituting 'bopm' for whichever list it is. just discard the spam in the list afterwards.