[ietf-nntp] unsubscribing users too aggressively

[Stan Barber]

Greetings... I have made the adjustments that have been suggested.

The bounce rate is now set to 10.0 and the filter is now set to not permit
postings with anything that has a body part called
"application/octet-stream" and I also upgraded mailman to 2.1.5.

I will also try to deal with the held messages backlog. There are around
2000 messages there for this list. I will also say that this list (of all
the lists I handle) is the WAY MORE active than anything else I host. So, it
is constantly processing posts. This is the reason that Russ is having a
hard time getting in to  look at the queue. As the site administrator, even
I can't get the administrative option page to load. I had to use the command
line utility to reset the options here.

On 6/21/04 12:06 PM, "Russ Allbery" <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Rob Siemborski <rjs3 at andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>> On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Ruud H.G. van Tol wrote:
> 
>>> Please compare the list archive to what you actually received. In
>>> that way you'll find out whether the problem is at your end.
> 
>> The problem does indeed appear to be the viruses (the archive doesn't
>> have Message-ids, but the missing messagers are the ones with "Subject:
>> Re: Hi" and "Subject: Re: Yahoo!" mostly from rra at stanford.edu.
> 
> Yeah, my e-mail address gets forged on viruses pretty routinely since I've
> used the same e-mail address for many years.
> 
>> Is there anything that can be done to either implement a virus scanner
>> on the list or make it much less sensitive to bounces? [e.g. if the
>> "you've been kicked off the list" message gets through, reenable
>> delivery?]
> 
> Stan, I can't get into the Mailman configuration; could you crank the
> bounce ratio up to something like 10.0 for this group (so that it takes
> ten bounces without a successful delivery before someone is unsubscribed)?
> There may also be some way of filtering out bad content-types, although I
> don't know if that would cause problems for some things people might want
> to send to the list.  (I think most of the viruses are attached as simple
> application/octet-stream.)
> 
> BTW, so that people are aware, Stan added me to the list of moderators for
> the list so that I could see what the list server was rejecting in case it
> caught anyone's posts by accident, but I'm afraid that turned out to be a
> lost cause.  The sheer amount of spam that this list gets that's turned
> away by SpamAssassin and non-member filters runs in the hundreds of
> messages a day.  The most I've been able to do is just keep the most
> recent ones in a folder so that I can grep through if anyone runs into
> problems.  Also, because of the sheer quantity of spam, I can't get into
> the moderation interface to Mailman to approve or reject posts; it looks
> like the number of pending posts is so large that it's overwhelmed the
> Mailman database.
> 
> If we weren't so close to being done, I'd advocate abandoning this
> particular address in favor of another.  When we recharter, I think it
> would be a good idea to do that.