Just to chime in:

I'm actually super impressed with how this transition was handled, how list admins were consulted and allowed to test their individual transitions. People were explicitly invited to try out test instances on MM3, and see if they could find any bugs. Follow-up has been extremely helpful in shooting down bugs that were bound to appear. Ahead of time, anticipated downsides were shared and where possible mitigated. People were invited to share concerns.

All in all this is a school example for how these transitions should happen. That doesn't mean that everything goes without a bump in the road, but the followed process is one that I could hardly make reasonable requests for improvement on. The fact that something doesn't exactly work out the way you hoped, does not mean that the process followed was flawed, and I think it's unfair to "summarize" this way.

Thanks a lot for all the work Kunal and Amir (and other people who undoubtedly worked on this behind the screens).

Lodewijk

On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 9:56 PM Kunal Mehta <legoktm@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

On 6/6/21 1:02 PM, Leon Haanstra wrote:
>
> Thank you for the information Platonides. So, summarizing the events so
> far. There was a transfer to mailman 3 without consulting any local
> communities.

I don't know what kind of consultation you wanted, but I think
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52864> tells the story pretty well.
It's been just about 8 years since this was asked for and I'm not aware
of a single person who didn't want to upgrade Mailman.

> Arguments like "a more modern look" and "convenience" were
> used.

Well yes, but the main reason was actually security.
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118641> explains the flaws in MM2.
We only discovered some major security/privacy issues in our MM2 setup
because we started working on the migration.

> The upgrade came and the persons responsible for the upgrade did
> so without fully releasing that there might be downsides or negative
> side effects.

Mailman3 is easily better than Mailman2 *overall*, but it's certainly
not perfect. Some key features are worse, missing, or broken. We've
asked people to file bugs and report issues to us when they encounter
them, but it's taking a while to get through everything because the list
keeps growing. We don't send email announcements every time we fixed
something because that would be pretty spammy!

> When people come forward with issue's regarding the
> upgrade not understanding what the issue is, the response is, take it up
> with Hotmail, the issue surely can't be the mailman upgrade. Microsoft
> should fix their stuff and if not, it's your problem.

It wasn't my intention to suggest that, sorry if it came across that way.

My take is that Mailman is sending emails that the user legitimately
signed up for, and Hotmail is *bouncing* them back rather than marking
them as junk or something else. I don't think Hotmail is doing the right
thing there, but I think it's clear something changed on the Mailman3
side that triggered this change in Hotmail's treatment of our emails.

But at the same time I feel pretty limited in debugging problems with
the CheckUser-l mailing list. There are no archives I can look at, I'm
not a subscriber who gets copies of emails, and I don't want to add any
logging to capture bounce messages in case they do have
private/confidential data. The next Mailman version will send the raw
bounce message to the listadmin (per
<https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/908>) which should give us
some more info, but it's not super straightforward for me to patch our
installation with, I'm still looking into that.

So for now the only suggestion I have is to reach out to Hotmail...or
disable bounce processing.

Maybe we missed some setting in the migration? I'm not sure, more eyes
are always appreciated, really. I and Amir and others who've already
spent time on this are committed to getting this issue fixed, and we've
already been doing so ever since we started the MM3 migration.

I enjoy working on mailing lists because I recognize how important they
are to the movement, but it's pretty demotivating to just read "oh you
didn't consult the communities" as a reason this shouldn't have been
done when that's blatantly false.
HTH,
-- Kunal
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