[SGVLUG] List Issues.

[Emerson, Tom (*IC)]

> -----Original Message----- of Michael Proctor-Smith
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Emerson, Tom (*IC) 
> <Tom.Emerson at wbconsultant.com> wrote:
[...]
> >  wouldn't it 
> > help to put a spam filter in FRONT of the moderation queue 
> 
> It was more then 46K when I stopped deleting 1K at a time I 
> have to figure out how to use xargs.

[hold that thought...]

> ... Anyway the problem is 
> that about 5 real messages made the moderation queue, in the 
> year that I would check on the queue, so I stopped checking. 

I suspect those were from members who were auto-bounced due to delivery
failures -- I'm pretty sure my other address died because of that -- not
that you would remember, but do you recall if any of those "real"
messages were from prospective list members who simply hadn't [yet]
joined?

> Until spam makes it to the list I don't really want to waste 
> the cpu cycles on spam filtering sense mailman does it pretty 
> well(by only letting members post to the list).

You might want to maintain a list of people who have joined and only
delete them when they explicitly remove themselves from the list vs.
auto-bounced by mailman -- your pre-filter would be "not in this list"
[sure, I know mailman is doing that already, but in this case you only
"waste" cycles when a legit member gets bounced and they post -- anyone
else gets trashed by you doing the check instead of mailman.

 I have to 
> google on just automatically trashing messages the are in queue.

Ironically, it turns up this page:

   http://imss.caltech.edu/cms.php?op=wiki&wiki_op=view&id=312

[see the last FAQ item -- though this applies to items marked as spam by
an external checker, i.e., spamassassin, and isn't recommended due to
the possibility of deleteing false positives, with a hit rate of 5
/legit/ non-subscriber messages per year, I don't think you'll need to
worry about FP's]

A little further down the search results, I see:

 
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/email/mailing-lists/mm-moderation.ht
ml

And the last item there reads:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
*Automatic Deletion of Messages Pending Review*

The configuration of some Mailman mailing lists will cause some messages
to those lists to be held for review by the list administrator/list
moderator. [...]

Mailman can be configured to automatically purge messages pending
approval after a specific number of days. To set the number of days
Mailman will hold your messages:

   1. Access the list administration web site
   2. [enter your list password]

   3. Under General Options, scroll down to Discard held messages older
than this number of days.

   4. Enter the number of days Mailman is to hold messages pending
approval (enter 0 for no automatic discarding of messages). If set to 0
messages will be held for approval until 21 days have passed.

   5. [Submit]

Messages that are pending moderation for 21 days will be deleted
automatically from the list of held messages. This purge of older
messages prevents the list pending message queues from becoming so large
they affect system performance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

> by the way there is still problem with the queue that 
> accordingly to the Mailman FAQ should fix its self but my 
> letting it go to long may have caused problems.

Yeah -- that is so important they repeated the last paragraph with
slightly different wording: 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
----Allowing these messages to accumulate on the mailing list server
negatively affects the performance for all lists on the server. To
prevent neglected lists from causing problems for the list system as a
whole, messages that have been held pending review for 21 or more days
will be deleted. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

So apparently they are doing something at an even higher level than
mailman to purge "old" messages, and by virtue of the fact that you
haven't set this option via the web interface as described above,
perhaps this is a recent enhancement to mailman?  [and we're not
"current"]  (or it wasn't obvious that this setting would have that
effect?]