Hi everyone,
Quite a few things have happened in the last 18 months since the last time we sent out a `bits from the listmasters', so here is your chance to find out what you have been missing out on. 1. Debian white-list Debian mailing lists are currently using something called Cross-Assassin (CA) which checks to see how often a message has been cross-posted. To make this work, all messages that come from an email address which is not subscribed to the list it is trying to post to, and is not on the white-list gets delayed by at least 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, CA checks that the email has not been cross-posted to other lists, and then lets the message through. To bypass this, you can subscribe yourself to the Debian white-list [1], which will allow your posts to go through faster, and skip this particular check. 2. Spam Despite popular misconceptions[2], the listmasters are not currently injecting extra spam into the lists when we feel the spam level is too low, and we have been trying to decrease the amount of spam constantly. For an idea of how things are going there, murphy.d.o, (our list server) is currently blocking over 60,000 emails a day. Unfortunately, this is still not good enough as there is still a fair amount of spam going onto the lists. In the future, we hope that our upcoming move to faster hardware will allow us to run more stringent anti-spam checks. Special thanks go to Santiago Villa who has made a number of useful suggestions, which have been quite helpful in reducing spam on Debian lists. 3. New & changed lists There's been a fair amount of changes since our last update: debian-custom: This list exists to help people working on CDD (Custom Debian Distributions) to communicate better, and to ensure that tools and procedures are shared. debian-desktop: This list can be used for discussions about the Debian Desktop sub-project which is dedicated to improving the desktop experience for Debian users. debian-jobs: This is a moderated announce list used to inform people of Debian-related jobs that they might be interested in. debian-kernel: This list is used by the various Debian kernel maintainers to co-ordinate their efforts, and for discussions related to kernels in Debian. debian-lsb: This list is used for the discussion and coordination of efforts towards ensuring that Debian meets the requirements of the Linux Standard Base. debian-qt-kde: This is a development list used by the maintainers of Qt and KDE packages, as well as related packages to discuss issues relating to those packages. debian-ruby: This list is used by maintainers of ruby-related packages to improve the ruby experience for Debian users, but also to discuss issues faced by ruby-related packages. debian-user-icelandic: This list is for Icelandic users, developers and translators. debian-l10n-greek: debian-l10n-hungarian: debian-l10n-russian: These lists are used by translators to translate Debian into their respective languages as well as improving currently existing translations. debian-amd64: Just to keep this email on topic ;-). This is actually the old debian-x86-64 which was renamed back in August 2003. debian-women: This is our latest list, which is used by users and developers for discussions and collaboration involving women in Debian. debian-chinese-big5: debian-chinese-gb: These two lists have also been revived after a long 6 months where they were inactive. There are now a number of extra moderators, and things are working much more smoothly. If you wish to subscribe to any of those lists, simply head over to http://lists.debian.org/<listname>, or email <listname>[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject subscribe. 4. Some numbers There are now 169 lists, with 162,861 subscribed email addresses (83886 of which are unique). Debian-curiosa now has over 1000 subscribers. Our list server is now attempting ~1,500,000 deliveries every day. 5. Misc As you probably realise, there are a high number of lists, and we can't monitor all of them constantly. This means that unless someone alerts us when something is wrong, we might not immediately notice it, even if we do try to be omniscient. If you're going to email[3] us, there's a few things you can do to ensure that we actually read it. Firstly, never bounce something to us, but forward it instead, with an informative subject. Please email us in English, as although we can deal with a couple of western European languages, we can't tell if an email is ham or spam if it's in chinese. Finally, if you haven't gotten a reply from us in a few days, please try again, we've probably missed your email. If you do find that you are not able to subscribe to any lists and that you are not getting any answers from the listmasters, please make sure that you are not using a challenge-response program, and that you have not blacklisted half the Internet. Regards, Pasc (with his listmaster hat on) [1]: http://lists.debian.org/whitelist [2]: Listmasters get an email almost every week (and sometimes more often) informing us that we should consider implementing some type of spam filter on Debian lists. [3]: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Pascal Hakim Do not bend.
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