allow non-lp users to post to mailing lists
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launchpad itself |
Triaged
|
Low
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Launchpad silently discards emails that are not associated with a valid Lp users. Non-Lp users cannot post to a list. This is an impediment to building a community of contributors, and ultimately is a barrier to users and teams from adopting Lp.
Launchpad has a long history of setting up user profiles from email address discovered in pofiles and commits. Moderation could do the same. A message from an unapproved address could be forwarded to the moderation queue. The queue/schema may need to change since the message is linked to an existing user. Since the act of message approval adds the user to the list of approved posters, it could *ensure* the user using the email address and name to effectively import the identity. Lp requires users to be active to us lp, but maybe a new state can be introduced...or revisit Person.standing to allow non-active users to post to Lp lists.
The lp-user-only rule is an effective means of keeping spam from entering the moderation queue. Changes to this rule should not dramatically increase the burden of the list moderator. We likely need some form of sanity check on the address to send it to the queue. pofiles and commits had a sanity check, and that makes them more trust worthy than email. Email that is signed or from a trusted domain may be an acceptable test.
I am setting this low since scope is not known. This could be high if the scope and certainty of success merit a few days of work.
| Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste) wrote | #1 |
| Changed in launchpad: | |
| status: | Triaged → Won't Fix |
| Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote Re: [Bug 772000] Re: allow non-lp users to post to mailing lists | #2 |
| Robert Collins (lifeless) wrote | #3 |
| Changed in launchpad: | |
| status: | Won't Fix → Triaged |
I'd argue for a Won't fix here.
There is significant draw-backs to doing this.
We would create a huge number of inactive profile for spammers. Given the prevalence of spam on the Internet, the ratio of legitimate non-LP users post to potential is probably something like 1 to 1000 or more.
For the same reasons, the moderation of mailing lists would become very tedious. Just contrast the moderation duties of Launchpad-based mailing lists to ubuntu/canonical hosted one.
The design of Launchpad mailing list was built on minimizing the annoyances related to spam.
Likewise, the reason we are not sending notifications to discarded is again because the huge majority of these bounces would either be to dead-end address or to people who didn't send the original email in the first place.
Spam sucks.