Re: [PLUG] Replacement mailing list idea

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 03:40:35PM -0400, Rich Mingin (PLUG) wrote:
> I think we collectively have a good relationship with Linode, and they've
> been quick to sign on to sponsor Fosscon as long as I've known. 

And that's not a bad idea, but -- and this applies to anywhere you
want to move it, whether it's Linode or Dreamhost or someone else's VM:
be sure to test mail acceptance from the host *before* you start
a migration.

(To explain: an uncomfortably large number of hosting services have
had or are having spammer infestation problems.  This can result in
various forms of blacklisting, whether by DNSBLs or individual operations,
and whether by individual IP address, network block, subdomain, etc.
If you lift-and-drop a mailing list instance into one of those, you'll
have an immediate uphill battle.  Sometimes this isn't too hard to
deal with; sometimes it's a real PITA.  It depends on the particular
circumstance and no two are alike.  Hence the advice to test first,
so that at least you'll know what you're walking into.)

I wish this wasn't necessary, but then again I wished that spam wouldn't
become a chronic/systemic problem, and well, that didn't work out. ;)

In part, I think this is a supporting argument for getting all the
LUGs together and Doing It Right, so that large and small LUGs can
all benefit and so that work expended on things like Mailman version
upgrades and DMARC mitigation can be applied across all lists.  (I also
think it'd be nice to have federated search over the existing corpus of
"all LUG mailing lists".)  This'd alleviate the need to go through this
exercise every 10 or 3 or however many years, and with the judicious
inclusion of a hot spare, it'd probably provide enough reliability.
I estimate the number of US-based LUG mailing lists at about 150;
haven't got much idea about the rest of the world.  Hard to say how
many people are on them: as one data point, NoVaLug has about 220.
But I doubt there are any large (more than 10K) ones and I would
guess that most fall into the category "hundreds".

Of course the technical part of this is the easy part.  The hard part
might be getting N mailing list admins to concur on some of the details,
for a value of N > 1. ;)   But the payoff would be huge, particularly if
it liberated some LUG mailing lists from operations like Yahoo and Google.
And it would really benefit new/small LUGs who don't have anybody to
handle this.

---rsk
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug