On Fri, 21 Apr 2023 at 17:20, Florian Weimer <fwei...@redhat.com> wrote:

>
> > For lists that are active, the split is confusing — when should
> > something be on the packaging list rather than devel? What happens when
> > something is related to both Cloud and Server, or Workstation and KDE?
> > One can post to both lists, but if someone replies and isn’t subscribed
> > to both, the conversation gets split.
>
> Do Fedora mailing lists reject mail from non-members, and redirect
> follow-ups?
>
>
Yes we have to. Most of the email coming to any of the fedora mailing lists
is spam email from non-subscribers. A good portion of it is 'smart' SPAM
where it replies to a specific email with headers to make it pop into an
existing thread. Fiddling with various spam controls to better handle that
has continually caused important developers emails to start being marked as
SPAM.

The first thing we did was to have non-member email moderated for the
lists. This sounds great but the amount of queued email on many lists is in
the order of 100k or more emails. The problem is that the version of
mailman3 uses some sort of linked list to keep track of all those queued
emails. Every email seems to get checked against that queue which then
slows down the overall system. Last year we were getting hour long timeouts
on mailman3, and I then spent about 3 man-weeks of volunteer time to go
through only about 100 mailing lists to clean out the 100k queues on each
of them. I stopped when the timeouts got down to a 'normal' amount but the
amount of junk email on the many email lists is a lot. There are probably
ways to do this directly in the postgres database, but my attempts required
restores from backups due to 'differences between our beta setup and what
is expected'.

Trying to upgrade mailman3 to a version which may be better has been,I
think, a 5 year task of continual frustration. When I was in
infrastructure, everyone always had about 10 other tasks of higher priority
that HAD to be done to keep other parts of Fedora running. When I left
infrastructure, that increased the tasks for the remaining people to 20.
Hiring in a replacement just found more things which needed to be kept
running so we have looked for volunteers for a while. Several attempts have
been made by volunteers, but real life and the overall complexity of modern
email kills it every time.

Running mailman3 is a nearly full time job to keep it working versus the
lackadaisical mailman2 it replaced. Because it is trying to be both a
webforum to catch that 'I don't want to use email' audience, a better
archiver, and various other tooling, Things like system accounts,
authentication, postgres databases, etc They are all needed to make it
work.

Outside of that DNS has many new fields which need to be implemented or
added to deal with slightly conflicting standards which cause various sites
to not accept email if they aren't implemented in their version. New fields
are added and changed regularly which require dealing with people
complaining that their email is now marked as SPAM, they aren't getting the
email anymore, or that we have lost email because the queues on our systems
overflowed due to various people subscribing to the SCM mailing list but
having a quota too small.

In any case, the issue is that there have not been for about 8 years to run
this well. The task gets harder and harder over time due to complex DNS
needs for email to work these days to just general time needed to clean up
existing spam, deal with ham being marked as spam, etc. And when it comes
down to 'does Infrastructure have time to keep builds, composes, and the
100 services running that are needed to do that' or 'does Infrastructure
work on some part of an undocumented email system'.. the answer is always
going to be get the daily builds out as developers complain a lot more
about that than email.

It is time to explore other options. One of them is the proposal that
Matthew and I guess the Council have come up with. It is using a resource
which is paid for, has an open source background, and is willing to make
some changes to better accommodate other workflows. If people want
something else they are going to need to come up with a proposal which does
not include using existing burned out resources to accomplish it.

-- 
Stephen Smoogen, Red Hat Automotive
Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle.
-- Ian MacClaren
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