Re: Policy for posts from non-members

[Kenneth Wolcott]

Hi Jean;

  I've been following this thread for some while.  I really applaud
your intentions and efforts with regards to this mailing list
management; your dedication is impressive and appreciated.

Ken Wolcott

On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 2:25 PM Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:
>
> Le mardi 21 février 2023 à 23:36 +0100, Jean Abou Samra a écrit :
>
> Hi,
> I've not been an admin of this list for very long, yet I'm already weary of 
> telling people who post without being subscribed to the list that they should 
> subscribe in order to avoid each of their messages being manually approved. I 
> wonder what you (meaning everyone, but especially Mark, the other admin) 
> would think about changing the list configuration to reject post from 
> non-members instead of holding them on moderation, with a message such as
> “Welcome to the lilypond-user mailing list. We apologize, but in order to 
> prevent spam, we need you to subscribe to the list before you post. Please 
> fill out the subscription form on 
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user.
> Once you are subscribed, you will receive all posts to the list, so you can 
> help out other people as well. However, if you only wish to interact with 
> this list infrequently, you may disable mail subscription in your membership 
> preferences after you have subscribed.
> If you believe you are already subscribed to the list, it probably means that 
> you accidentally posted from a different email address than the one you are 
> subscribed with.
> If you have any question or encounter problems, feel free to contact the list 
> admins at lilypond-user-owner@gnu.org”
> On the plus side, this means that instead of delaying the message until Mark 
> or me looks at it, the feedback will come instantly.
>
> An update on this:
>
> It turned out to be a really bad idea. Fortunately, Bob Proulx, an admin on 
> GNU's Mailman server, noticed the change and explained why.
>
> The problem is backscatter. If a spammer sends a spam while making it look 
> like it comes from a real address that is not subscribed to the list, the 
> person this real address belongs to receives an automated message from the 
> list, which is viewed as unsolicited. Not only is that bad for this person, 
> but it leads to DNS blacklisting for lists.gnu.org, which affects all GNU 
> lists badly.
>
> I apologize for this; I didn't realize this implication at all. The change 
> has been rolled back and things will just remain as they were before. Thank 
> you Bob!
>
> Jean