Minutes: Grex Board of Directors Meeting. Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Aug 8 22:40 UTC 2006

Grex Board of Directors Meeting. Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Board Members in attendance: Mark Conger, Lynne Fremont, Joe Gelinas, 
Larry Kestenbaum, John Remmers, and Janc Wolter. 

Non Board Members in attendance: Steve Andre (by phone), Jim Diegart, 
Sindi Keesan, and Mary Remmers.

TREASURERS REPORT:
In June we took in $271.18 and spent $150. In July we took in $144 and 
spent $150. We have 51 members and 41 paid up with the others being in 
a grace period. Mark allows people to maintain memberships in a grace 
period, especially long term members. 

STAFF REPORT:
Remmers installed an IRC client called IRCII. Only members can connect. 
It uses a wrapper. Steve made some changes to the kernel. Grex has been 
more stable. We are still having users break in. 

Grex is currently listed on two spam systems which is an improvement 
from what it was before. Steve is working on getting us off of those 
systems. Turning off mail to newusers has significantly decreased the 
amount of spam sent from Grex. There was one user recently (lullo) who 
was caught sending spam. The user attempted to send 110,000 pieces of 
mail but only 6000 were actually sent. We need to come up with a policy 
for giving new users email.  The current policy is that staff will give 
newusers email on request. Some suggestions for policy:
1.      Limit outbound email to some amount for newusers (e.g 5-20 
outbound emails per day)
2.      Continue with the status quo of keeping email turned off for 
newusers and grant it only by request but with a change to the text of 
the newuser program reflecting this policy
3.      Grant email to members and former members so that email would 
still be mostly free. A person could become a member for one month for 
$6 and then allow membership to lapse but still have outbound email 
privileges

There was discussion where the board decided that we should move in the 
direction of granting everyone email but with limits on outgoing email 
of perhaps five per day at first and then an increased limit after a 
period of time. 

MOTION by Mark Conger: We will continue with the present email policy 
until such time as we can implement a policy where users are subject to 
an adjustable email per day limit. Seconded by Lynne Fremont. Passed 
unanimously.

The modems are still not answering sometimes. They are working now 
though. 

OLD BUSINESS:

Lynne wants to extend the deadline of the web contest.

MOTION by Mark Conger to give Lynne Fremont authority over web contest. 
John seconds. Passes (all in favor, Lynne abstains)

Set date for next meeting:
Tuesday Sept 26th at 8p at John Remmers s House

NEW BUSINESS:
Nharmon would like permission to submit the grex logo to wikipedia

MOTION by Mark Conger to allow grex s logo to be used on wikipedia. Joe 
Gelinas seconds. Passed unanimously

Keesan would like a script that would set up Spam Assassin for new 
users. Jan says that Spam Assassin takes up a lot of resources so if we 
set it up for all users, we would need to make it more efficient. This 
would be a good project for someone to work on.  Someone  does not 
necessarily need to have root access to work on that issue so anyone 
who wants to work on Spam Assassin is welcome to work on it even if 
they are not officially staff. 

Meeting adjourned 8:36p

response 2 of 30:

Aug 28 04:51 UTC 2006

I wonder why people think spamassassin would be so hard on grex's resources?
It seems pretty clear that relatively few people actually *use* grex for
email, and certainly, a global spam daemon would be more efficient than n
invocations for n different users.  I'd strongly recommend against modifying
something to make it "more efficient" unless (a) strongly committed to getting
those modifications back into the project's mainline source base, or (b)
measurements clearly indicate a need for such modification.  I'm not sure grex
is either.

response 4 of 30:

Aug 28 19:46 UTC 2006

Could people be allowed to specify that they do NOT want to receive any mail
at grex and would this save some cpu time?  Many people have abandoned their
accounts to the spammers.  

response 6 of 30:

Aug 29 03:37 UTC 2006

Define "lots".  Certainly, many orders of magnitude fewer people than use,
say, hotmail or gmail or yahoo or whatever.  I'm not sure that running spamd
would be that noticable on this hardware.  Of course, there's also the option
of moving mail to another machine which *does* run spamd.  Come to think of
it, this hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth.  Maybe it's time to
upgrade to a newer machine, move the users to that, and move mail to this
machine, putting both in rackmount cases.  We'd be taking up less room at
provide.net than we presently are.

response 8 of 30:

Sep 4 22:13 UTC 2006

I wonder how many resources setting up spamassassin in a daemon configuration
for about 1,000 users would require.  I doubt it would be that many.

response 10 of 30:

Sep 5 18:03 UTC 2006

I have a .forward pointing to my gmail account and it works beautifully at
detecting spam.

response 12 of 30:

Sep 5 19:02 UTC 2006

re #11
 What is the difference between allowing people to have POP access to
 their e-mail and allowing them to .forward their mail?
1.Storage locally vs offsite
2.Nodes in use
3.The .forward is available to all (right?)
4.It opens another service for possible exploit
5.POP3 complaints may overburden the overburdened existing staff

response 14 of 30:

Sep 5 19:11 UTC 2006

Bandwidth issues could arise from attachments.  I've seen POP hang on systems
where people have over a thousand emails some of which have over a Meg of data
file attachments.  It really depends on the rules that are put on mailboxes
and the amount of folks accessing POP at once.

response 16 of 30:

Sep 5 20:07 UTC 2006

If members were given POP access I would never use it, except perhaps to
alleviate an over-full mailbox during a period in which I had no access to a
SSH or telnet client and was outside the area code. If members were given IMAP
access I would use it only if I had no access to a SSH or telnet client, if at
all (since my preferred mail client that handles IMAP is pine). My other email
accounts that I use these protocols on, I do so only because they don't offer
direct access and there's nothing on those servers for me besides email anyway.
(POP has stopped working for me on the one address I used it for -- GMail -- by
reporting every message as new every time; I use IMAP for my college-provided
mail and much prefer it to webmail because of its strange handling of
mailing-list digests.)

response 18 of 30:

Sep 6 13:19 UTC 2006

I was on the fence about this proposal until I read McNally's #15, which
sounds to me like a strong reason for *not* implementing it.

response 20 of 30:

Sep 6 20:06 UTC 2006

okay, remmers.  i've never heard the expression, "on the fence" before.

response 22 of 30:

Sep 8 17:52 UTC 2006

fanks.

response 24 of 30:

Sep 8 23:14 UTC 2006

he writes "fanx", nate