I’m subscribed to “mailing list mode” for this forum. Today, a few of the emails that came in had the following at the bottom
Heads up: We send a maximum of 100 daily emails. Check the site to see the ones that might be held back. PS thanks for being popular!
Is this a standard policy here? Is it documented anywhere?
Is there a checkbox I can click in my account settings for “I can handle the spam–send me everything”
Even if you can handle it all, we might get in trouble at various points between your mail client and our server for sending too much or too frequent mail out, which is why I guess this limit is in place.
There’s no way to change this limit on a per user basis (esp. as this could be done maliciously by someone on, say, hotmail or gmail or other shared mail infrastructure, making mails from @metabrainz.org get into the bad book), but we can maybe change this setting (max emails per day per user) on the site if we’re actually hitting it now.
@zas, can I summon you for your thoughts on the matter?
<eyeroll>
It’s great that there’s finally a popular web-forum software that does email-subscriptions.
But I wish the Discourse team had someone on it who was actually familiar with how mailing-lists work.
They’re taking problems that were solved 20 years ago by mailing-list-software authors and trying to solve them from scratch!
Since we are currently relaying through gmail gapp, and it has limits (10k emails/day apparently, but that’s not very clear to me), I’d rather be very conservative here.
Also I wonder if this feature relates to reports we had recently about GMail considering community forums unsecure or the like.
This is a prime example of ignoring things that mailing-lists have had a solution for for decades now.
There’s no good reason to be relaying your mail through a third party. A group of people who are smart enough to build and maintain a high-quality music database–should find it a piece of cake to install a simple mail server on your own machine. There’s years of historical practice showing that this just works
Thousands of mailing lists do this all the time, and the only ones that relay through google are the ones actually hosted on google.
It baffles me that this is complicated.
We had plenty of good reasons to make this choice, one of them being not having internal resources to maintain such services, another being that simple and mail server hardly fit together.
Of course it may change in the future, as we are plenty aware this solution isn’t ideal.
Do you have any experience in deploying and maintaining secure SMTP and IMAP servers on linux systems, together with advanced anti-spam features ?
If so, would you happen to have spare time to configure, migrate and document such services for MetaBrainz if we decide to move away from third-party ?
Being an open and contributor-based project, we accept any help, especially if it benefits to all.
I’m pretty sure IMAP (nor POP) isn’t necessary for a mailing list. (It may be useful for other things…)
I would be happy to get involved in this. I’m a little unclear as to how – this isn’t the usual “make a patch/submit a pull request” kind of thing – you’d need to give me an account on your servers, right?
If we can figure out a path forward for me to get involved, I’m in.