Mailing list reorganization summer 07, round 1

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7/17/07, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-16 at 14:43 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > > In the past, there has been resistance to doing list renames like this.
> > > Perhaps that's changed, but it needs investigating.  Mike -- let me know
> > > if you want me to check into this
> > >
> >
> > I'm not familiar with the history of this so if you get a moment I'd
> > appreciate it.
>
> In the past, I've been told by IT that they did not like renaming
> Mailman lists.  There is sure to be a (possibly arcane) reason for it.
>

A long time ago, when I only had a dozen grey hairs... the problems
with renaming lists was that people kept replying to the old emails
and the angry emails about why the link on XYZ page is broken would
end up with postmaster, etc until it got to the CEO level where
someone would say "please fix this.. I had 200 phone calls in my voice
mail about not being able to post to not-my-memo-list at redhat.com
anymore."

So requests would go that not only do I need "not-my-memo-list" to be
called "i-luv-bumper-stickers-on-memo-list at redhat.com" but please also
redirect email for a certain time or have an auto-responder added for
each of the 10 lists I changed. Then as we 'acquired/merged' various
companies there was the need for making us receive
"my-old-memo-list at cygfree.com" to "we-merged-really at redhat.com" and it
needs to go out to the mail servers in california because we can't
move over this stuff yet because it breaks things. So in the end, the
front-end Red Hat mail servers ended up with a sendmail.cf file that
only Alan Cox and maybe Eric Allman could understand. [At one point we
went on a push to move to postfix, but we actually ended up going back
after Wietse Venema was found drunk in a bar crying "please dont make
me look at RH's bug reports anymore... There was also a very vocal
contingent to use exim but when told that they would need to be
available 24/7 to answer reports and we gave them a listing of every
email problem that development opened per day not including marketing,
three took jobs with Oracle because it would be easier work. (Ok I am
going overboard on the hyperbole here...)]

In any case, the email routing has been a proverbial nightmare at
times... mainly because it had to be inside of Red Hat AND it had to
use existing Red Hat infrastructure AND it had to work for everyone at
every office AND there are 2-4 people who know how it exists (no one
knows how it works.. although when we quit making sacrifices of virgin
technical support people once.. and the dot.com bust occurred the next
day).

That being said, moving it to use its own infrastructure WITHOUT using
the existing servers should be easier than trying to get vhosts, mail
routes to rename fedora-memo-list at redhat.com ->
fedora-tech-list at fedoraproject.org, etc.



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"