Hi Erica, Now @Evan has 2x new volunteers, I am sure that there are a few more :) I would love to attend the BBB meeting (GTALUG AGM), but it is just before 3am in my time zone on a day where I have to work a full day the next day Whatever the group decides though, please do consider that there are many skills on the list and that between us we could probably do anything :) I would love to contribute whatever is needed to ensure that gtalug mailing lists continue existing, even if @google or whatever the group decides... On Thu, 01 Dec 2022 12:33:49 +0000 Erica Peterson <epeterson@protonmail.com> wrote:
What about something like this? https://www.mailmanlists.net/en
$50/year (USD) for a list with up to 1000 subscribers (prices go up from there). I'm not sure how many are on this list.
I'll happily help administer if the hosting is taken care of (ie, the hosting provider handles server admin, patching, etc).
Cheers, Erica
------- Original Message ------- On Thursday, December 1st, 2022 at 2:30 AM, ac via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Wed, 30 Nov 2022 11:30:46 -0500 Evan Leibovitch evan@telly.org wrote:
<snip>
We've had some very smart people running mailman and it still doesn't work to anyone's satisfaction. Or maybe it's our SMTP server, I don't know which one it is.
So, this is the place to start.
When "directors" or "boards" or "leaders" make decisions on policy it affects operations. Always. and many times it is "politics" and "feelings" and without a proper understanding of the underlying real issues.
Some background: Re Email: GOOGLE relays almost all of the email on the planet, with Microsoft trailing in second place and the rest of the planet as a small minority.
This has come about mainly because of the initial vast difference in how abuse was handled in the past. Google and Microsoft simply re-writes bounce messages or simply deletes/loses transmission. to be fair most of the surviving email providers like myself, now does exactly the same thing. We are all now lying as this is the new normal and the other new normal is that whenever you receive any incoming relay from Google or Microsoft there are gambling odds that it is rubbish. Google wants and does relay vast amounts of electronic email BUT they do not receive or act on abuse complaints via electronic mail :) Microsoft still receives abuse complaints via email, but, in my own personal opinion: much of the submitted email abuse complaints are meaningless and a waste of time.
Anyway Evan, you said that you tried sending an email to this list on Sunday: I do not know if you received a bounce notification or if your email just disappeared - but the nett result was probably that your email to the list was not distributed. So, on my smtp servers what happened would depend on the reason. For example if the Google server Google used to relay your email was also hacked and sending out malware not yet in anti virus strings, your email would just have silently been deleted and you would not even have received a bounce notice - as Google would have probably either deleted the bounce notification themselves or they would have re-written it to something obtuse stating that failure is due to an administrative prohibition at the recipient mail server (as they never accept responsibility and always blame the victim for their own abuse)
Also, I heard the first time in 1989 that email is dead, after that there has been a thread or news discussion almost every year stating that email is dead. But email is just so unique in that it is imperfect, like us and I am not so sure that it will go quietly into the night anytime soon. Mailing lists however maybe will die, but the level of signal to noise is just so high on other platforms (which is why IRC never killed mailing lists..) that should a group allow their mailing list to die, or fall into disuse, it may affect the quality, diversity and activity of the group.
Regarding your issues with either mailman or smtp server, you do not seem to know or be sure: imo it is more probably the smtp server and also probably not the smtp server itself, but the settings and configuration policies of external free data providers.
Also, it is quite possible that the smtp server is behaving correctly by, for example rejecting your Sunday email - as the server your provider may have been using may have been a compromised server and could have been listed on RBL like Spamcop or sorbs DUL or some other high trust DROP list.
How these things are handled is different in different providers, but what works best is to simply drop everything from the hacked server. So, if for example a Google server becomes hacked and is pumping out malware with an email from Evan, it is all rejected or dropped, depending on policy.
It sounds like gtalug does not have policies supported by majority of users?
(Should Evans email from a blocked public server be bounced - or not - and which free block lists does gtalug trust and use for drop - how is drop handled (bounce or nay?) etc etc etc.
If you move the mailing list to Google you will also not have to worry about control or policies as these will be set by Google.
It also means that when there are REAL issues (You would not believe this but Google is not perfect...) 1. You will probably not know about it 2. You will not be able to do anything about it 3. You will probably not understand it 4. You will do whatever Google says to resolve the issue (Recently I had to create another @gmail account as part of the "resolution" of a technical issue - and it took three weeks to resolve...) 5. etc etc etc.
The existing people on the Board have just become exhausted and the volunteers with the tech skills and keys to everything aren't always reachable. As volunteers I don't expect immediate tech support, but it just makes the process of constant firefighting more than we are prepared to bear.
Well, I have also now volunteered. As I am in a different time zone maybe this could help as I could be available when others are not?
cannot take more than an hour or two per month to admin.
I can only tell you that this is nowhere near the effort required, which is an insane amount of effort required for a small group like ours.
then you need more automation/scripts - seriously, it cannot take that much of your time and even now, I have zero understanding of what you are saying is constantly borked or what you are doing in terms of spending so much time on?
Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial hosting cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the bounce messages and it's almost impossible to keep track of. (Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really don't like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam. if your own email to mailman is bouncing, this is probably not what you think it is :)
It probably isn't. But I'm tired of running after other people to diagnose.
If the actual problem is at your chosen sender and not at gtalug - what is the policy?
imnsho - Policy: If the sender (You or your provider) is at fault - there is nothing to "diagnose" or resolve at gtalug - the sender can send again, whenever the sender provider actually works - but this is not the current policy? - the current policy is to diagnose the issue at gtalug or try to "whitelist" the sender (and then something else breaks?) or what is the current policy?
That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything.
and this sentence is the crux of it. personally I do not trust google.
I can't guarantee that I'll be alive tomorrow, either. There is no reason to believe that Google for Nonprofits is going away any time this decade, and if there is I'd love to hear it. If they tried it, the outcry from the charitable world would be deafening. There are many reasons and ways to mistrust Google; this isn't one of them.
it would be far easier to pay 10 bucks and get three sysadmins to each donate
an hour a month (and their scripts :) )
That's the whole point of this conversation. We're already paying a nominal hosting fee and have volunteer sysadmins and things are still constantly borked. IT IS NOT EASIER, let alone FAR easier, our real-world experience to date bears that out.
I think I understand the "constantly borked" issues?
You do know that the issues are very unlikely to be technical issues, right?
It sounds like POLICY issues and not a technical issues?
For one, if a gtalug is attempting to relay to the list from an abusive @google server how should this be resolved?
- I would suggest that it is not whitelisted - as this would also mean that there will be other issues :)
- I would suggest a policy that the user or board member or whomever tries re-sending or sending from a non blocked server...
I seriously just do not understand what is constantly borked? and I am 100% sure that whatever issues there are can be easily fixed.
Regading wordpress hosting - It is so simple to admin a vps with gtalug wordpress on apache with modsec rules. When combined with cloudflare and other free services (matomo etc) and properly configured and hardened it simply is not difficult at all.
But again, what breaks wordpress is when there are no set rules and when any plugin or theme from anywhere is allowed/used without someone actually reading the code.
imho policies, rules and protocols (if you are in control thereof) is crucial to the non borking of anything.
so, if you decide to continue having an emailing list and self hosted services
I would gladly donate some of my time (at least four hours a month [...]
If all we had to do is threaten to move services to Google in order to get more people to volunteer, we could have done that ages ago. We're well past that. Your four hours a month are still very much valued, but we need that energy for more things than just keeping things running -- especially when we have an offer, at no cost, of commercial-grade online services.
providing that there is at least one (or two) other high/senior skill
dev/sys/ops also?
See? Every volunteer effort comes with strings and limitations. So does mine. So does that for everyone else on the Board. A group this small should not need to be spending so much of its behind-the-scenes energy just herding cats. There's too much else to do that isn't being done just so we can keep the virtual lights on.
- Evan
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