RE: Reminder: please maintain mailing list archive at ietf.org

[Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <Donald.Eastlake at motorola.com>]

(1) Well, I went to look at the secretariate archive for TRADE and, besides the real mail, it has lots of spam which isn't in the real WG archive. It would appear that the archive addresses are on spammers lists. This greatly reduces the utility of the archives in my mind. Seems to me the headers could be checked and almost all mail directly to the archives tossed. (Ideally the archives would have only the mail really send out on the mailing list, but that would probably requires the exploders to sign outgoing mail which is another whole discussion.)

(2) Having the right secretariate archive address on a WG mailing list always struck me as something whose checking would be pretty easy to automate. You just send an automated test message near the beginning of each month to every WG mailing list. About a week later, you check if they all made it into the archive files (just check for some unique string in the body of the test mail like a hash of the date sent and WG name). If you don't find it in the archive for some WG, you send off a ping to the WG chairs/ADs/whoever...

Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: wgchairs-admin at ietf.org [mailto:wgchairs-admin at ietf.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Narten
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 2:05 PM
To: wgchairs at ietf.org
Subject: Reminder: please maintain mailing list archive at ietf.org

I happened to need to go look in some WG mailing list archives today,
and in doing so, I was reminded that not all WG mailing lists are
being properly archived. I've followed up with some individual WG
chairs, but suspect there are others as well. Please take a moment to
verify that your mailing list is being properly archvied at:

       ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/

Also, be sure that there is actually something in the current months
archive!

The need for this is documented in RFC RFC 2418, which says:

>          As a service to the community, the IETF Secretariat operates a
>          mailing list archive for working group mailing lists. In order
>          to take advantage of this service, working group mailing lists
>          MUST include the address "wg_acronym-archive at lists.ietf.org"
>          (where "wg_acronym" is the working group acronym) in the
>          mailing list in order that a copy of all mailing list messages
>          be recorded in the Secretariat's archive.  Those archives are
>          located at ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive.  For
>          robustness, WGs SHOULD maintain an additional archive separate
>          from that maintained by the Secretariat.

Thanks,
Thomas