Dealing with Fedora's mailing list

[Tim]

On Sat, 2009-07-04 at 04:47 +0200, gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> When I subscribed, I was asked for a user name. This user name appears
> nowhere, just my email address. It seems the user name is just a way to
> make you believe that your email won't be divulged.

I don't know why you believe that.

The sign-up page [1] makes it clear the name is optional, so I can't see
how an optional thing can be a vital part of your signing up.  All I see
with the optional name is that I can supply a name as well as my email
address, so that if the list owner does write to me, they can address me
by name.  No different from how we write e-mail addresses, in general:

   "person's name" <email-account at domain-name>

The "person's name" is just for us to read, it forms no part of the mail
delivery system.

And you'd have to be newcomer to MAILING LISTS to not expect that your
"from" address would stay with the messages you post to the list.  It's
most usual for mailing list posts to have:

   TO address as the list address
   FROM address as the author's address
   REPLY-TO address as the list address

1. https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

> Besides, what's the advantage of all those shenanigans to Red Hat? If I
> wanted to spam this group, I'd open an account at Altern, from there one
> at Google, from there, one at Yahoo, from there, one at Altern, from there
> one at Google, 10 times around. It would take months before all the
> addresses are exhausted.
> 
> What would make sense, is asking people to subscribe from an address that
> correspond to an ISP.

It's just as easy to knock up throwaway addresses on some ISPs.  Some
ISPs are just as slack at dealing with spammers, nor getting real ID on
their users.  There are so many mail providers, it'd be a tough job to
sort out all of which were anon webmail types and which are more
discerning ISPs.  And some ISPs don't offer any mail service, so it
would be isolating some people if they *had* to use an ISP address.

I don't use my ISP's because (a) their mail service is crappy, (b) I
change ISPs when they get too crappy, (c) I hate having to change
subscriptions to deal with (b), and (d) it's really hard to do (c) if
your ISP suddenly changed and you no-longer have access to that address.

> It was suggested that I use Gmane. My new server is eternal-september.org
> (Formerly Motzarella.) The gmane groups are not available. I wrote to
> Wolfgang, whose's always doing his best to offer prime quality service...
> and never sent the email.

gmane is a news server, rather than a list of groups that are carried
across other news servers.  You enter their server name as a news server
into your news client, using it independently from any other news server
that you might use.  Good news clients let you work with more than one
news server.

> Another solution, if I understood well, would be to delete on arrival all
> emails coming from Fedora lists at Altern and reading/posting from my
> provider. (I hope I don't have to read at Altern and copy/paste at my
> provider to answer! That would be a pain too.)

Here's how I do the two-subscription method:

Sign up twice to the Fedora list, with two different e-mail addresses.

On one of those subscriptions, I set the options on the Fedora list
server to NOT send out any mail.  That ensures I don't get any list mail
to that subscription, and nobody's bandwidth gets wasted by any list
mail.  And I set that subscription's mail (yahoo) account to delete any
mail received by it, that doesn't have a magic keyword in the subject
line.  But the only mail it will receive will be the random spam.

The other subscription sends me individual messages.  I receive list
mail on my second email account.  I have nothing special set up on that
account.  But when I reply to any of them, the "from" address of my
replies is set as the first one.  So recipients only see my address that
auto-deletes all mail.

e.g. Subscribe with ignored at yahoo and reading at yahoo.
     List subscription for /ignored/ sends me no mail.
     List subscription for /reading/ sends me mail.
     /ignored/ Yahoo account deletes all mail without password.
     /reading/ Yahoo account accepts mail.
     My mail client retrieves /reading/ mail.
     My mail client has ignored at yahoo configured for the *from* address.

> My problem, is setting it to deal with Fedora/Red Hat servers, which was
> done automagically at Altern but, when I send, I can't see the server I'm
> sending to in the interface and there's a sleuth of server addresses at
> Red Hat in the incoming headers, none of which have pop in them. I know
> it's not necessary, but is the first on the list the one to use?

Unless you're doing additional filtering, I don't know why you're trying
to concern yourself about POP addresses with Fedora.  You don't access
Fedora mail servers directly, they mail you and you get mail from your
ISP.  You mail them through your ISP.  Just the same as receiving and
sending mail to anyone else.


-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.