-- On Monday, April 14, 2008 8:58 PM +0200 Frank Ellermann <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote regarding Re: IESG Statement on Spam Control on IETF Mailing Lists -- > Russ Housley wrote: > > > When IETF lists are housed somewhere other than ietf.org, > > they are supposed to include an archive recipient so that > > there is an archive available at ietf.org > > Makes sense. I have submitted some lists to "other lists", > how is this archive recipient magic arranged ? I can tell you what is supposed to happen. The short answer is that RFC2418 tells you one of the two email addresses to subscribe to your "other list" to get an archive on the IETF web site. However, I think that guidance is at best incomplete. The rest of this message is the long answer and why I think that guidance is incomplete. RFC2418, IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures, says this in Section 2.2 Charter: As a service to the community, the IETF Secretariat operates a mailing list archive for working group mailing lists. In order to take advantage of this service, working group mailing lists MUST include the address "wg_acronym-archive@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" (where "wg_acronym" is the working group acronym) in the mailing list in order that a copy of all mailing list messages be recorded in the Secretariat's archive. Those archives are located at ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive. For robustness, WGs SHOULD maintain an additional archive separate from that maintained by the Secretariat. In turns out that this guidance is both incomplete in practice and, unfortunately, wrong in one detail. The incorrect detail is that the IETF no longer uses the domain lists.ietf.org. In fact, it never used it correctly. During the transition we discovered 7 domains used for mailing lists, the predominant one being the domain "ietf.org". As part of the cut-over it was decided to use the domain "ietf.org" exclusively for all IETF lists. Everything was setup that way with backwards compatibility in place for all existing lists that used some other domain. Today, all lists are created in "ietf.org", unless they are IAB, IESG, or IRTF lists. In practice, there are a few incomplete details. First, there are actually two aliases that need to be subscribed: WG_ACRONYM-archive@xxxxxxxx WG_ACRONYM-web-archive@xxxxxxxx Some might ask how this separation came to be? I don't know and never asked. It is continued today mostly for convenience; it's quite tedious to "undo" the current setup and there are more important things to be done. Second, except for the guideline in 2418, there's no process or documentation to go with this whole model on the IT side. Here's a sampling of some questions. 1. There's no maintenance of this practice. Last year the IETF did an audit, for the first time in forever, and brought everything up-to-date. This means that at that time all the "other lists" had an archive on the IETF web site. However, we're out of date again. 2. These archives have a SPAM problem. Well, they had a much more serious SPAM problem. Early in the post cut-over process AMS (Glen Barney) added some SPAM protection to these archives. However, all the best work has been put into getting Mailman firmly entrenched and protected. My opinion is that the IETF should just create a mailing list for every WG and then these "other lists" should just subscribe the IETF list to their list. This way there's no "extra" work on the IT side to protect things, particularly since Mailman provides some useful built-in features. In addition, we don't need these "magic" aliases any more. 3. Part of the maintenance problem is that for obscure reasons the IETF subscriber on these "other lists" will drop off the list occasionally. I'd be interested in hearing any good ideas for how to deal with this issue. 4. The Secretariat has to take action to make these email addresses work. I realize this is probably obvious to everyone here, but in the interests of completeness it should be documented that if you're going to setup an "other list" you need to ask to have the archives created. Or, perhaps, a back-office process should exist (does not currently) that says these archive should be automatically created whenever a working group is created. 5. These questions and issues are frequently asked or framed in the context of WGs. However, on the IT side, they apply more broadly, i.e., they apply to BOFs, directorate mailing lists, and other private lists. This not normally visible to the community-at-large, and perhaps should be at least accessible in some way even if it's not announced, but my comment here is that none of it is documented in any way. Jim _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf