[Project-managers] Recent COIN-OR mailing list issues

[Matthew Saltzman]

Beginning on or around June 11, our mailing list server was spammed
with over 500,000 subscription requests to various mailing lists from
many obviously fraudulent addresses. Because the requests did not
appear to Mailman to be errors, Mailman just kept processing them as
normal with no notification that there was a problem. Meanwhile, our
spam filters tend to make processing mail somewhat slow in any case.
Because our traffic is generally low, that is usually not a problem,
but with the spam, processing essentially came to a halt. With no
further traffic, it would have taken about 17 months to clear the list
mail queue!

I have removed all pending subscription requests, and over the last
several days, the remaining few thousand messages have been cleared, so
processing appears to have returned to normal.  You may have seen
several old messages arrive in the last few days while Mailman cleared
the backlog.

I will try to identify the few legitimate subscription requests and
push them through in the next few days, but it is possible that I will
miss a couple. If you know of someone who was trying to subscribe, have
them try again. I am also looking at ways to speed up processing
without sacrificing too much power to filter spam. You might want to
check the queues on your project lists to see if there are posts that
are queued that need to be approved or discarded as spam.

Apologies for any inconvenience this incident may have caused.
-- 
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu