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Figure out if we can remove legacy domain support for mailing lists
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Description

Originally mailing lists were @wikipedia.org and then moved to @wikimedia.org and maybe @mail.wikipedia.org at some point before ending up at the current domain of @lists.wikimedia.org. See the 2007 announcement.

We still support those domains for legacy lists: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/puppet/+/d15a397fe548d041c4aa3932a4a83f29e9d2fb68/modules/role/templates/exim/exim4.conf.mx.erb#261

Do we need to continue supporting those old domains?

Event Timeline

Change 681242 had a related patch set uploaded (by Legoktm; author: Legoktm):

[operations/puppet@production] exim: Drop support for legacy mailing list domains

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/681242

akosiaris triaged this task as Medium priority.Apr 21 2021, 11:02 AM

Change 681724 had a related patch set uploaded (by Legoktm; author: Legoktm):

[operations/puppet@production] exim: Clean up remnants of legacy_mailing_lists

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/681724

Comments from Gerrit:

@herron said:

I'm in favor of removing this, but still see a fair amount of legacy list mail in the exim logs.

For now I think we should keep the legacy_mailing_lists file, and use it to write a rule that rejects these messages with a useful 5xx message to the effect of "legacy @wikimedia.org lists names have been retired, please send mail to this list via listname@lists.wikimedia.org instead"

@Platonides said:

The proper error code would be 551 («please use this other email instead»). Not that I am aware of any implementation using it, but it would be nice to use a proper code.

Still, I'm unconvinced about the need of dropping this support.

Probably we should figure that out, given that it already exists continuing to support it isn't a huge burden...or is it?

Change 681242 abandoned by Legoktm:

[operations/puppet@production] exim: Drop support for legacy mailing list domains

Reason:

Needs more discussion, can happen on task first

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/681242

Change 681724 abandoned by Legoktm:

[operations/puppet@production] exim: Clean up remnants of legacy_mailing_lists

Reason:

Per parent

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/681724

I did some quick analysis and it appears like the vast majority of traffic to the old addresses is spam. As an example, for the messages sent on March 29th, it appears all of them were spam:

$ sudo ./mailman-rejects message_ids.2 /var/log/mailman3/mailman.log.2.gz
ACCEPT: 0
HOLD: 29
DISCARD: 63
REJECT: 43

Given that most of the mail is spam I think it would be acceptable to reject with a 551 error code for a couple of weeks and then pull out the legacy configs entirely.

Change 777423 had a related patch set uploaded (by JHathaway; author: JHathaway):

[operations/puppet@production] mx: reject email to legacy mailing list domains

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/777423

Change 777423 merged by JHathaway:

[operations/puppet@production] mx: test rejecting email to legacy mailing list domains

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/777423

Change 779128 had a related patch set uploaded (by JHathaway; author: JHathaway):

[operations/puppet@production] mx: reject email to legacy mailing list domains

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/779128

Change 779128 merged by JHathaway:

[operations/puppet@production] mx: reject email to legacy mailing list domains

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/779128

jhathaway closed this task as Resolved.EditedApr 12 2022, 2:32 PM

Emails are now being rejected, gmail presents rejections like this:

2022-04-11-162926_1181x740_scrot.png (740×1 px, 74 KB)