# Operating our services

## Mailing list moderation

Our mailing lists experience the same barrage of spam mails than any other email address. We do have a spam filter in front of it, and since the lists require registration, spam ends up in the moderation queue. But not only spam ends up there, sometimes users send inquiries without registering first. It’s a custom of the project to let these through, so that such emails can be discussed. This requires manual intervention.

This section describes the tasks related to mailing list management.

### Registration

To participate in mailing list moderation, you need to become a list moderator or owner. This is up for the existing owners to handle and if you want to contribute in that area, it might be best to bring it up at the leadership meeting.

After gaining leadership approval, list admins can add you to the appropriate group in the mailing list backend by selecting the list, then User / group-name, and add your email address there.

### Regular tasks

Most of our lists are auto-subscribing, so users can register themselves and finish the process by responding to the double-opt-in email. Some lists are manually managed though. The mailing list backend shows the number of open subscription requests for these lists on the mailing list’s main page.

It also provides a list of held messages, where they can be accepted, rejected or dropped. Spam should be dropped, that’s clear. Emails with huge attachments (e.g. screenshots) should be rejected, which gives you an opportunity to explain the reason (in case of large attachments, something like “Please re-send without attachments, offer the files through some other mechanism please: Our emails are distributed to hundreds of readers, and sending the files to everybody is inconsiderate of traffic and storage constraints.”)

Legit emails (often simple requests of the form “is this or that supported”) can be accepted, which means they’ll be sent out.

If you notice recurring spam sources (e.g. marketers) you can put them on the global ban list to filter them out across all lists. It takes entries in regular expression format.