Dear Cent OS mirror admins, and also dear admins not related to CentOS,
this mail only regards the mailing list centos-mirror@centos.org and is not related to specific mirroring issues. I kindly ask you to read it nevertheless.
I'm an administrator of a mirror serving content of more than 50 projects, CentOS being one of them. As it happens, some things like changed IP addresses, firewall issues, DNS changes, and bigger outages need to be announced from time to time. Please read this message trying to understand my perspective, wanting to serve as many projects with as little effort as possible.
For this task, I have at least one contact address for each project. In the case of CentOS it is this list. This list only accepts mails from subscribers, which I learned the hard way. Based on this I have the following suggestions and topics for discussion:
1) Open the mailing list to allow unsubscribed admins to send. This works with almost all of the other projects, and I guess they are perfectly fine with it. Try mirrors@debian.org, mirror-list-d@redhat.com, mirror-admin@gentoo.org, admin@opensuse.org, mirrors@ubuntu.com just to name a few.
2) If you decide against 1), at least INFORM the senders that their messages are filtered out. In the past week I thought I was being ignored, as I did not receive such mails. This obviously is not a feeling you want to nurture in admins supporting your project.
3) (As a precaution) Make sure to reply to the original sender, not only to the list. I don't want to receive the messages relating to specific issues sent by OTHER mirror admins, as this is what I consider spam. Those mails are not of any interest to me.
4) Make the "Mail delivery" option default to false. I appreciate that I can disable receiving messages from other admins (see 3), but having to set this up myself is putting even more work on my shoulders.
Thank you, Carsten