mailman and cross-service email whitelists

From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> · Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:58:17 +0000

On 28 Mar 2008, at 16:18, Sandro Hawke wrote:

>
> [dropping foaf-dev since (a) I'm not on it so I can't post to it, and
> (b) I think it's against the list policies to cross post
> non-announcements.  Shame on all of us for doing it so far.]

The main reason is spam-control, sadly. It was out of hand before we  
switched over from my rdfweb-dev list to the successor, foaf-dev,  
which Edd Dumbill kindly hosts. I don't know much about his setup  
except that it seems a pretty much 'out of the box' installation of  
Mailman.

Re list policies for non-announcements, i'm happy seeing interesting/ 
relevant threads cross both lists. This recent 'triples last for ever'  
theme is driving me nuts, but that's a personal not a list policy  
issue ;)

W3C and other large mailing list hosts often have posting policy  
mechanisms that take advantage of their size; if you're "in the  
system", then your posts can often go through, even if you're not an  
active subscriber to the list.

One thought I have here, that is perhaps student-project sized (anyone  
at MIT near W3C perhaps?) ... could we get mailman patched so that it  
could take as input a list of hashed email addresses from other list  
hosting sites. It should probably involve an extra argument to the  
hash to make attempts to reverse-engineer the address list a bit more  
expensive. Getting the RSS/Atom patch integrated and having foaf:Group  
info exported as an option would also be cool, but I don't know much  
about how the mailman project works, ie. what would be socially rather  
than technically feasible.

This is a variant on the old http://www.w3.org/2001/12/rubyrdf/util/foafwhite/intro.html 
  idea. It would be great if semweb-related email lists elsewhere (at  
least using such a patched mailman) could allow cross-posts from  
members of semweb lists on other sites. And not necessarily limited to  
semweb of course, but ... gotta start sometime.

In the meantime, apologies for the lack of cross-posting. The foaf-dev  
archives are at http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-dev/ with  
subscriptions at http://lists.foaf-project.org/mailman/listinfo/foaf- 
dev ... it offers a daily digest, for the email overloaded. And  
whatever else mailman does by default...

cheers

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/