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Grex > Coop13 > #376: The problems with Grex, e-mail and spam | |
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| 25 new of 480 responses total. |
jep
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response 398 of 480:
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Dec 22 01:04 UTC 2006 |
re resp:378: Todd, I was involved in organizing the hardware classes
that TS Taylor taught. I tried to follow up and do it again a few years
later, along with linda, but there was no interest at all at that time.
None, other than the two of us.
I was involved in K12Net -> Teachernet. I can probably list every
person who contributed time to that project.
I was involved in lots of those things, probably all of them, but very
few others were.
Arbornet tried expanding into roles outside of those which were it's
core. All of those attempts were failures except the hardware classes.
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tod
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response 399 of 480:
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Dec 22 01:26 UTC 2006 |
re #398
I was around for all of those things also. I can actually remember a jubilant
TS coming back to the house on Forest Ct after one of the classes. K12 was
a flop because it tried to accomplish too much without enough human resource
to support it. Several 386's sat dormant or were used to play games in
classrooms. There were many attempts on the charity and education end but
at no time has the "computer conferencing" or "interaction with computers"
part of the 501(c)(3) education qualifier been missing.
You say there was never an interest in community forums or education but I
say M-Net has had that from the getgo.
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ric
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response 400 of 480:
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Dec 22 13:42 UTC 2006 |
For the record, I remember all of those things. Particularly one version of
the manual which i helped produce and we sold hundreds of copies at the Art
Fair offering "FREE INTERNET ACCESS". It was a very profitable venture for
Arbornet, and filled the coffers because 1996 was a time when people were
really starting to discover the internet. I remember the hardware kits and
the hardware classes as well.
That was 10 years ago.
My only point was that the "charitable mission" - for both Cyberspace
Communications and Arbornet - is a joke at this point. 10 years ago is pretty
irrelevant.
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tod
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response 401 of 480:
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Dec 22 17:55 UTC 2006 |
So you don't see free system access and unpaid volunteers as charitable? Hey,
that's your loss.
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cmcgee
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response 402 of 480:
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Dec 25 23:02 UTC 2006 |
(hauling this back to the email issue)
Found this in the Info Conference.
Looks like you can't email staff anymore. Is that true???
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#244 of 245: by hakleton (hakleton) on Sun, Dec 24, 2006 (15:02):
Hello, I have a problem with the mail program from grex, I am unable to
sent emails to anyone outside grex, every time I sent an email this
response comes:
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 14:34:32 -0500
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@cyberspace.org>
To: hakleton@cyberspace.org
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
grex-staff-exploder@hvcn.org
(ultimately generated from help@grex.cyberspace.org)
You are not allowed to send mail to external mail sites.
------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
What can I do about this?
-------------------------------------------------------
Really, you ought to be able to send an email to Grex help.
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gelinas
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response 403 of 480:
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Dec 25 23:07 UTC 2006 |
For various reasons, most (all?)) of us (staff members) read our mail on
other systems. So "staff@cyberspace" goes off-system. I don't have a
solution to getting mail from newer users to the staff, though. :(
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cmcgee
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response 404 of 480:
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Dec 26 03:40 UTC 2006 |
That's an email addressed to help@grex.cyberspace.org
Not to staff, just to help. Surely we can figure out a way that someone can
get help questions answered. That's a pretty basice service for someone who
is new to our community.
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spooked
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response 405 of 480:
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Dec 26 04:06 UTC 2006 |
Please don't assume anything is basic to Grex staff.
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cross
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response 406 of 480:
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Dec 26 05:21 UTC 2006 |
I think using something like RT, which mediates the email on behalf of the
user (the user sends email to RT, which is local to grex, and then RT sends
email to staff, via the RT account, which could be permitted to send offsite
email). RT has other uses on a system like grex, as well (it could, for
instance, be configured with a queue for authorizing users to have Internet
access, etc).
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt
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gelinas
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response 407 of 480:
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Dec 27 02:26 UTC 2006 |
"There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza."
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cross
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response 408 of 480:
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Dec 27 02:36 UTC 2006 |
Isn't it Dear Eliza?
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cmcgee
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response 409 of 480:
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Dec 27 14:00 UTC 2006 |
Then fix it dear Jo-oe, dear Joe, dear Joe.
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ric
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response 410 of 480:
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Jan 3 19:00 UTC 2007 |
re 401 - the volunteers do so because they want to keep grex and mnet up, not
because it's charitable. M-Net has no volunteers doing any significant work
other than Rex, who kindly keeps the system running. The arbornet board has
had one meeting in the last 2 years. And you've filled out some paperwork.
I appreciate that, I really do. But I don't think those things make
arbornet's charitable mission worthwhile.
Free system access may have been a worthy charitable mission at one point,
but today? Hardly.
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rcurl
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response 411 of 480:
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Jan 3 19:06 UTC 2007 |
It is just one aspect of the bases for Grex's 501(c)3 tax exempt status - or
is that status also passe?
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cross
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response 412 of 480:
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Jan 3 19:15 UTC 2007 |
Regarding #410; I've offered to do systems stuff on m-net, but rex seems to
not want additional help.
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tod
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response 413 of 480:
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Jan 3 20:37 UTC 2007 |
re #412
Well yea, that's the major difference here is that Rex is recognized as the
SysAdmin by board appointment. Unlike Grex where leadership is ambiguous.
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cross
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response 414 of 480:
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Jan 3 23:39 UTC 2007 |
Yeah, that's cool. I'm just saying that it's not like he hasn't had offers
for additional help. Perhaps he doesn't need it, but peole who are like,
``m-net is so poor: they only have one sysadmin!'' are distorting the truth.
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cyklone
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response 415 of 480:
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Jan 4 00:04 UTC 2007 |
m-net also has no email, so it presents far fewer problems.
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naftee
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response 416 of 480:
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Jan 4 07:31 UTC 2007 |
rick moot
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cross
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response 417 of 480:
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Feb 27 01:47 UTC 2007 |
So it occurs to me that there's something we can do about spam: make email
opt-in and outsource spam filtering for those users who must use grex for
email. They can handle the cost of, e.g., using messagelabs.com's service.
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keesan
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response 418 of 480:
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Feb 27 02:05 UTC 2007 |
People who 'must' use grex for email are dialin users who don't have money.
Why should they be required to pay for spam filtering when grex has the
capability to do it?
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cross
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response 419 of 480:
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Feb 27 02:50 UTC 2007 |
Because grex doesn't have the capability to do it. If they can't afford it,
they should figure out how to use POP3 to talk to gmail or yahoo. You know,
you can use email hosted somewhere else without using a web browser.
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cmcgee
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response 420 of 480:
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Feb 27 03:19 UTC 2007 |
If they don't have the money, then they are more likely to want to spend the
time fixing a spam filter. It is not that it can't be done on Grex, it is
that staff has higher priorities.
Sindi, if they cannot afford the for-pay service, then you can show them how
to do it for free.
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keesan
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response 421 of 480:
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Feb 27 03:42 UTC 2007 |
Yes, that is what I want to offer via the motd. People who can figure out
how to use POP3 to talk to gmail probably can afford an ISP.
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cross
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response 422 of 480:
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Feb 27 04:28 UTC 2007 |
This post is sort of `thinking out loud,' not a plan of action. I'm looking
for comments here, not buy-in. So comment away.
Yesterday, I drove to Maryland and back with Tom Limoncelli, author of The
Practice of System and Network Administartion (if you're in that business
and haven't read that book, you have a problem. If you read it and didn't
get something out of it, then you need to give it to all the people that
report to you and get them to read it). He told me about the
messagelabs.com solution, and it sounded really good.
I'm coming to think that it's just not worth it for grex to even try and run
spamassassin or any of the rest of it. The cost of messagelabs isn't very
much; about $50 per person per year. Also, since they're an anti-spam
company, it's well known that their servers don't *send out* spam. We could
configure grex to route *outbound* mail for verified members through them
and then we wouldn't run into that annoying situation where mail from grex
users gets blocked because grex is known for sending out spam.
Thus, a good overall solution for email is the following: slash the cost of
a grex membership in half, to $3/month or $30/year. Users who want email
have to become members and also agree to have their mail routed through
messagelabs.com, which does all the spam and virus filtering for us, and the
users agree to cover the cost of their email being filtered, for a total
cost of $30 + ~$50 = ~$80/year. Grex's email configuration and firewall
rules are modified so that connections to the mail server from outside grex
are only allowed from messageslabs.com's servers. We modify our DNS data to
point our MX records to messagelabs and let them take care of the spam
problem for us.
This provides an economic disincentive for users to continue to use email at
grex, but not a terrible one: cost is only $20/year more than being a member
now. It also basically eliminates the staff involvement in email: our email
system can go back to being stupid and simple. Email is such a hard problem
to solve from a staff perspective that I think we just have to start taking
the position that users have to share in the cost. I'm sorry if it's a
bummer, but there it is. This organization is just not in the position to
support email as a first-class application anymore: it's just too hard. We
need to abandon or outsource.
For other users, we might be able to set something up where certain
usernames are passed through to grex without filtration, and on grex's end
we forward them to another provider of their choice (e.g., hotmail, yahoo,
gmail, whatever). Then they can configure, e.g., pine or mutt to connect
to those remote servers on the POP3 and SMTP ports so that they can use grex
to read interact with their yahoo or gmail accounts. We could open ports
in our firewall rules allowing access to a certain limited set of ports at
the major mail providers (all of which require authentication, so sending
spam through grex would still not be possible; or, if they did do it, they'd
get their accounts at the Yahoo or GMail side closed almost immediately).
But the point is, we need to face the reality that grex just does not have
the bandwidth in terms of staff time and availability to run its own mail
anymore...
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