Hi Bob, Thanks for this very thorough answer.
In the meantime I can confirm that I *do* get the occasional pending requests as I sent out a test mail on Tuesday afternoon that I got offered for moderation on Wednesday mid-day(!) and it indeed showed up in the browser and I could approve or deny it. So that at least is in line with your explanation. As for the delay, I already removed the test-traffic so can't examine the headers anymore. I've just sent out another test, see how that goes. I'll keep you appraised. Thanks, Tom. -----Original Message----- From: Bob Proulx [mailto:b...@proulx.com] Sent: 27 July 2016 22:23 To: Tom Uijldert <tom.uijld...@gmail.com> Cc: savannah-hackers@gnu.org Subject: Re: [savannah-help-public] Mail list: cannot approve moderated email Hello Tom, Tom Uijldert wrote: > I have some problems with a translator mailing list and they referred > me to you, so here goes: This mailing list is fine since pretty much the same people working on the mailing lists are also working on Savannah too. Not 100% overlap but pretty close. But the mailing lists are actually separate from Savannah. > I'm the administrator of www-nl-translat...@gnu.org Each time a mail > is held for moderation, I get a message with a link, telling me where > I can approve or deny said request. Yes. That is (unfortunately) what GNU Mailman does. > When I follow that link, however, it *always* shows me: "There are no > pending requests". Most mail is spam. For spam messages the listhelper robot moderate will run the message through SpamAssassin. If the message is categorized as spam then the listhelper robot will automatically discard the message from the hold queue. Therefore in the case of typical spam you won't see a message because the robot is faster at discarding the message than you are at getting over there to see it. For non-spam messages the human listhelper volunteer team will periodically scan through the held messages for the mailing lists and review and approve any non-spam messages. For non-spam messages if it has been approved by the time you get over there then again you won't see the message. This process is described in more detail here: http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/ListHelperAntiSpam/ Normally we unmoderate subscribers and whitelist non-subscribers after seeing a valid message from them. We hold unknown new senders for review, including subscribers, because spammers often subscribe and then post spam. Therefore we review all initial messages from all addresses. But after that then there is no more delay. When configured as we do normally I always recommend that the listowner ignore those Mailman administrivia messages. I use procmail to filter them out of my mailbox. There is no way have Mailman not send them. A misfeature IMNHO. Therefore automatically filtering them out is advised. Many owners don't have an easy ability to do that in which case I suggest removing your email from the mailing list owner field and replacing it with the listhelper-moder...@gnu.org address. (That's listhelper-moderate AT gnu.org to avoid the email address redactor.) That is the generic address which goes to the human listhelper volunteer team. That way anyone requesting subscription help will get helped. You are still free to log in and do normal administration regardless of the email address. Unfortunately while the listhelper SpamAssassin works well for the shared Bayes database for English language lists the Bayes isn't very sharable by other languages. Much spam on the english language lists is in other languages and this tends to train the Bayes engine that those messages are spam. We have been talking about creating a separate Bayes database for each language but it hasn't been implemented yet. Because of this and depending upon the normal content of the non-english language list the shared SpamAssassin Bayes database may have to be disabled for it. Which is painful when there is a lot of spam which then requires a human to do all of the removal. I suggest taking a cautious wait and see attitude to see what content will normally be on the list. > In addition, when I test the list by sending to it, it takes 4-6 hours > before an "is being held" and a "requires approval" are sent out. This requires more investigation. That may be simply the normal ebb and flow of email through the lists.gnu.org Mailman system. Normally mail flows through very quickly. But at times things are saturated and takes longer. Or network links may be offline and things catch up when back online. Sometimes the machine is saturating sending out large messages. Or it could be that you are seeing the once daily cron reminder nag messages from Mailman which run the queue once a day. Could be any or none of the above. Normally mail flows through very quickly. The incoming email relay is eggs.gnu.org which receives all of the mail and does some preliminary anti-spam. Then messages are passed on to lists.gnu.org to Mailman. If you show us headers then look at the Received: headers and see where the delays are occurring. Bob
