>>>>> On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 09:55:49 -0800 (PST), Randy Presuhn <rpresuhn@dorothy.bmc.com> said: Randy> As someone who has maintained a couple of WG mailing lists for Randy> several years, I'd object to the imposition of such a Randy> requirement. The amount of spam, especially *large* (megabyte Randy> or more) viral messages, directed at WG mailing lists makes Randy> keeping all the trash a highly unattractive proposition. I think the proper solution here is to use proper tools rather than to impose another burden on the list administrators. Mailing management has come a long way in the last few years. The easiest package I've seen for administrative purposes is probably the mailman package, which is being used by a very very wide range of Internet groups. As an example, all of the SourceForge mailing list software is managed by mailman. I strongly encourage the use of a more intuitive mail package like mailman. I've managed many mailing lists with it, ranging in size from a few people to > 5000 and I must say that it makes administration easy. Moderated lists, or subscriber-only lists are more easily taken care of because list administrators just have to click on a button that says "reject" or "accept" or "discard". The nice thing about the reject action is that it sends back text to the user saying what the problem was and how they can likely correct it. IE, the complaint that started this huge thread (dropped problems as opposed to a properly worded response going back) are generally taken care of by the software, not the administrator, which is important. It's so easy to use that my Dad can and does use it, who knows nothing about SMTP, sendmail, aliases, unix, postfix, ... I'm sure Randy Bush will have no trouble with it. It's only disadvantage is that it's heavily web based, which will probably make a few people groan. However, it would be rather trivial to write a mail-based, script-based, or other wrapper around it if that was the only problem with it. IMHO, it's long past the time that the IETF should have a centralized mail management system where lists can be (not forced to be, of course) centrally created and yet still managed by individual list authors. The ops area has been doing this for a while, but I think it makes sense for the main organization to host this instead if possible (yes, I do realize that a server and bandwidth would have to be donated to the cause). It's all the small administrative issues like this that detract us from real work on real protocols. Let's fix this at the global level, please. Sourceforge hosts > 51,700 projects most of which have multiple mailing lists associated with them. We should learn from their experiences. -- Wes Hardaker Network Associates Laboratories