Re: [tdf-discuss] Mail List issues

Hello,

Mailman has not been chosen mainly out of two reasons:

1. Moderation via e-mail is not comfortable. It especially requires one 
password shared among all moderators, which is inconvenient.

2. Although virtual domains are supported, the list name can only exist 
once per Mailman installation. That means, discuss@de.libreoffice.org 
and discuss@it.libreoffice.org could not exist. It rather would have to 
be de-discuss@de.libreoffice.org and it-discuss@it.libreoffice.org. In 
addition, managing virtual domain names is a bit more complicated in 
Mailman compared to mlmmj.

I agree that Mailman provides a lot of other great features that would 
come in handy and would have saved us a lot of time, but the above two 
limitations are real tough to deal with.

I also agree that mlmmj has some drawbacks, but basically, it does it 
job very well. To my understanding, many complaints would have either 
occured with other lists as well -- like some people want attachments, 
others don't, the next ones love forums, others don't -- and other 
things are not bugs in mlmmj itself. For some configurations, Google 
Mail seems to omit the "+" in the addresses, however, the + is supported 
by RFC, so it's clearly a bug at Google that affects us. Other people 
complained about not being able to receive e-mail -- most of the time, 
it has been a few French providers blocking the mails without any 
reason, and, again, in violation of the RFC, not even answering to 
e-mails when the postmaster is mailed. Features like "mark moderated 
messages" are really desirable, but they are not supported by any other 
mailing list system, IIRC, so we would have to implement that ourselves 
anyways.

And, what I also see, people simply cannot read. They send email to the 
help alias, but do not understand what to do. That would have occured 
with Mailman as well, and I guess people would have even be more 
confused by the web interface and the password they need.

There are a few drawbacks that will be solved with a newer mlmmj release 
we plan to roll out soon, like the cut-off moderation messages.

We also plan to provide an administrative interface, where list owners 
can edit some settings and (un)subscribe people. I agree that a lack of 
this is really ugly. However, it needs time and resources, so if anyone 
volunteers to code, let us know. :-)

NoOp wrote on 2011-03-09 04.05:

> 1. Why are unsubscribed posts even allowed? It would seem that folks
> would have learned from the OOo list history.

This is an endless discussion. Ask five people what they prefer, and you 
get seven replies. I am fine with both, but IMHO, the majority of list 
moderators wanted unsubscribed posts to be possible.

> 2. Why are multiple moderators necessary? If it's to get some poor soul
> to sort&  reject spam, then there are automated tools to do that instead.

Most spam is filtered out already. There are not multiple moderators 
necessary, it's just convenient. Technically, one is enough.

> 3. Why are we getting posts on the user&  other lists using
> Mlmmj — Mailing List Management Made Joyful:
> http://mlmmj.org/
> that the user can't unsubscribe, or can't set nomail?

Might be related to the Google problem. In addition, Google archives 
one's own e-mails without putting them into the inbox first, which 
confuses some more poeple.

> 4. Why is it necesary to send an email for unsubscribe instructions?

That's indeed a limitation for mlmmj -- unsubscription for the digest 
version of the lists are different than to those for the non-digest. I 
see no reason for a digest, but lots of users demanded it, so enabled 
it. It usually leads to broken threads, but then, you can't make 
everyone happy... :-)

> Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+help@libreoffice.org
> etc at all? Hello... is this some type of secret handshake that takes
> place to get off of the users list?

No. But send an e-mail and *READ*. It's explained in clear words, I 
guess. :-)


> What seems to be the problem with simply posting the unsubscribe
> information on the website and at the bottom of each post? Such as:
> ====
> To unsubscribe, send an empty e-mail to
> discuss+unsubscribe@documentfoundation.org

That does not work for digests. I received a lot of mails from digest 
users unable to unsubscribe.

> So why the requirement to send and ask for help? Is it because Mlmmj —
> Mailing List Management Made Joyful may not be so resilient/secure
> overall? Does the<listname>+unsubscribe@documentfoundation.org not work
> any longer?

It does, but not for digests. Indeed, this *is* a serious drawback that 
annoys me, but then, I don't have the resources nor the knowledge to fix 
it. :/

Florian

--
Florian Effenberger <floeff@documentfoundation.org>
Steering Committee and Founding Member of The Document Foundation
Tel: +49 8341 99660880 | Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff | Twitter/Identi.ca: @floeff

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