Re: [GTALUG] At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services
On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:03 AM ac via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
to admin a vps or two with apache/nginx and mailman with a few thousand? subscribers is, imnsho, not a major thing and in terms of vps costs is maybe like 10 bucks a month (for two vps) if even two is really needed
The issue is not the server or its cost, but the care and feeding of web services: - Email (multiple lists) - Aliases - Forms and surveys (*) - Website - Shareable calendar (*) The ones marked with (*) We would LIKE to do but don't yet have the tools and/or time and/or smarts to do. I have been on the mailing list for ten? years now and I do not remember
any month where gtalug had any volume that exceeds what a five bucks per month vps can carry and a properly configured mailman (which is very mature and can be battle hardened)
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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
Does anybody know anything about https://librelist.com/ for hosted Mailman lists? If this is a reliable service it seems tailor made for this group. For the rest (website, forms/surveys, shareable calendar) you can pretty easily get a managed Wordpress (Namecheap is $66/year for example), but in my (limited) experience, hosting providers that offer managed Wordpress often don't want to handle email discussion lists. Cheers, Erica ------- Original Message ------- On Wednesday, November 30th, 2022 at 11:30 AM, Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:03 AM ac via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
to admin a vps or two with apache/nginx and mailman with a fewthousand? subscribers is, imnsho, not a major thing and in terms ofvps costs is maybe like 10 bucks a month (for two vps) if even two isreally needed
The issue is not the server or its cost, but the care and feeding of web services:
- Email (multiple lists) - Aliases
- Forms and surveys (*) - Website - Shareable calendar (*)
The ones marked with (*) We would LIKE to do but don't yet have the tools and/or time and/or smarts to do.
I have been on the mailing list for ten? years now and I do notremember any month where gtalug had any volume that exceeds what a fivebucks per month vps can carry and a properly configured mailman (whichis very mature and can be battle hardened)
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.
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.
cannot take more than anhour 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.
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.
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 eachdonate 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.
so, if you decide to continue having an emailing list and self hostedservices I would gladly donate some of my time (at least fourhours 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) otherhigh/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
Hi Erica. On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 3:06 PM Erica Peterson <epeterson@protonmail.com> wrote:
Does anybody know anything about https://librelist.com/ for hosted Mailman lists?
That would be great to know, because the librelist.com website doesn't itself seem to know this. The main page says what it is but there are no links to use the service or get more info. Looking at the site map gives me links to ... types of 55 gallon drums <https://librelist.com/articles1.html> ? If this is a reliable service it seems tailor made for this group.
The latest article I can find on the service is more than a decade old. It was a one-person operation <https://github.com/zedshaw/librelist> that, even when operating, did not have ease of use as a priority <https://kurtraschke.com/2010/10/librelist-ideology-trumps-usability>. Maybe it still operates but you need to learn the secret handshake. I have no patience for such games. I would not consider this reliable.
For the rest (website, forms/surveys, shareable calendar) you can pretty easily get a managed Wordpress (Namecheap is $66/year for example)
Not quite. The managed service usually gets you barebones Wordpress. Posts and pages. Things like forms <https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/best-wordpress-survey-plugins-compared/> and calendars <https://wpbuffs.com/wordpress-calendar-plugins/> usually require third-party plugins of assorted quality which we would be solely responsible for choosing, installing and administering. I have far more fear of WordPress module authors losing interest (which *has* badly burned me in the past) than I have in Google discontinuing its nonprofit program. In other words, "pretty easily" is ... subjective. but in my (limited) experience, hosting providers that offer managed
Wordpress often don't want to handle email discussion lists.
There's a good reason for that ;-). Let's face it. Email discussion lists are legacy. They're cumbersome and fighting a never-ending battle with spammers and phishers. The main server software choices in current use are listserv (36 years old and proprietary) or mailman (23 years old and FOSS), and you gotta find a host and suitable admins. Plus we still need to maintain an SMTP server, along with anti-spam tools such as RBL hooks which only add more complexity. As a result, most third-party providers of list-based email services these days are one-directional and campaign-based (ie Mailchimp), sources of spam rather than fighters of it. I know very few people younger than 40 for whom email is a preferred means to engage in discussion. GTALUG has been experimenting with other tools such as a presence on Discord, but email remains the preferred tool of people here for reasons I can best ascribe to inertia. That's OK, but the effort to tame this email beast, in its current form, is too much to bear for our limited resources. (If I had my way we'd be a series of group chats on Signal). Google offers a path for continuing to use email lists that we can live with. - Evan
On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 6:50 PM Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: snip
There's a good reason for that ;-).
Let's face it. Email discussion lists are legacy. They're cumbersome and fighting a never-ending battle with spammers and phishers. The main server software choices in current use are listserv (36 years old and proprietary) or mailman (23 years old and FOSS), and you gotta find a host and suitable admins. Plus we still need to maintain an SMTP server, along with anti-spam tools such as RBL hooks which only add more complexity. As a result, most third-party providers of list-based email services these days are one-directional and campaign-based (ie Mailchimp), sources of spam rather than fighters of it. I know very few people younger than 40 for whom email is a preferred means to engage in discussion.
GTALUG has been experimenting with other tools such as a presence on Discord, but email remains the preferred tool of people here for reasons I can best ascribe to inertia. That's OK, but the effort to tame this email beast, in its current form, is too much to bear for our limited resources. (If I had my way we'd be a series of group chats on Signal). Google offers a path for continuing to use email lists that we can live with.
Speaking only for myself - - - - well there is a good reason for that inertia! I am finding that I limit my checking communication time to hopefully only 2x per day. (I try not to get too frustrated with 3X but do that if I'm not getting any work done - - - I'm already tired so then its not like I'm using valuable work time!) Adding another communication technique to the list of 1. cell phone texts (I can't do this as I live rural and am in a reception hole but most people would put that first!) 2. phone calls 3. emails (multiple accounts) 4. texts using a secure service (telegram/signal et al) 5. snail mail 6. other well that would just takes more 'usable time' from my work day. I do not get paid to amble around my communications so o o - - - I ask that entities that I 'treat' with respect my need to get work done. Have read of companies that have studied this in their employees and found that limiting communication time to only 2 separate times per day results in a greater amount of work product (assuming that the object isn't closely tied to communication!!!). And this idea is driving my communication practices. Viewing anything business related from the desires of the 'under 40' crowd. Well - - - imo the common malaise is that too many people today go to work for a paycheck. They do NOT go to work to get the job or work done. Have run into a few exceptions to that but they literally are 'exceptions'!!!!!! That difference needs to be understood. Moving to multiple methods of communication would likely fragment communication even further and would, imo, further reduce the amount. IMO an even bigger problem is convincing people that they actually 'need' to communicate! Regards
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
participants (4)
-
ac -
Erica Peterson -
Evan Leibovitch -
o1bigtenor