moderated/held messages on mailing lists

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 05:42:38PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> On Fri, 21 May 2010, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 05:25:00PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> >> Hi Everyone,
> >>  If you are receiving this email then you are listed as the owner of a
> >> mailing list hosted by the fedora project. We've had a lot of messages
> >> sitting in the heldmsg queue in mailman. This is where messages that are
> >> being held for list admin or moderator approval go. They sit there
> >> FOREVER until someone discards them.
> >>
> >> With this in mind we'll be instituting a 1 month age out for these
> >> messages. If a message is in the heldmsg queue for longer than 1 month
> >> the message will be discarded.
> >>
> >> Most of these messages are from people (or spam bots) who are not
> >> subscribed to the list. If you would rather that messages from addresses
> >> not subscribed to the list were rejected instead of being held for
> >> approval, this is a configuration option in the mailing list admin pages
> >> available to you, the list owner.
> >>
> >> If you have questions on how to set that up please feel free to contact
> >> the fedora infrastructure folks.
> >
> > Is disk space so expensive these days?
> 
> It's not disk space it is actually crowded directories. Mailman puts them 
> all in one dir and directory access start to slow down when you have 21K 
> entries in them.

So the problem is not length of time, but number of messages in a
directory.  Why is the limit not set on number of messages, rather
than time?  Is there one directory for the whole of the Fedora mail
system, or one directory per mailing list?  Can individual mailing
lists opt for longer timeouts?

> Why did you cc this to the devel list? It wasn't sent there.

So this can be discussed.

Rich.

-- 
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