[Free-RTC Discuss] sending the FOSDEM RTC devroom CFP

Daniel Pocock daniel at pocock.pro
Mon Oct 28 18:36:18 GMT 2019


Hi everybody,

In the interests of sharing experience of how we manage the devroom,
this is a report of how we have been sending the CFP, improvements this
year and problems we faced.

We have a repository where we keep the CFP text, a list of mailing lists
and the scripts for sending the emails:
https://github.com/FreeRTC/fosdem/

In previous years, we had some complaints that some users are subscribed
to many lists and see multiple copies of the CFP.  This is a difficult
problem to address because we want to welcome every RTC project in the
room and some developers only monitor a single list.  Nonetheless, in an
attempt to make it less troublesome, I included a References header in
the messages and prefixed the subject with "Fwd:" so that if you receive
multiple copies in a single folder, they will be displayed threaded.

I've also changed some IP addresses since last year, the first attempt
to send the message resulted in "Relay access denied" DSNs to all the
admins, that was immediately corrected in the relay host and the script
was run again.  No other user should have noticed this glitch or
received duplicate messages as a consequence of this.

Google (Google Groups) spam filters are becoming stricter.  We had
multiple problems with this.  The first problem was the mail command
inserting an additional "From" header, the spam filter rejected all
those messages.  I tweaked the script to fix that and re-sent the
messages to the Google Groups lists.  Then we received a bounce from one
of the Google Groups (Oleg, can you please cut and paste or forward the
message to your list?):

"There was a problem delivering your message to
turn-server-project-rfc5766-turn-server at googlegroups.com. See the
technical details below.
LEARN MORE
Warning This link will take you to a third-party site
The response was:
Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit
http://mail.google.com/support/answer/188131?hl=en to review our Bulk
Email Senders Guidelines."

I notice that the message has appeared in some of the other Google
Groups lists (e.g. prosody-users) but didn't appear at all in others
(e.g. it is missing from homer-discuss and there was no bounce,
Alexandr, Lorenzo, can you comment and/or share the CFP?)

If you are on a list where the message didn't appear, please feel free
to forward it.  We recommend that everybody follow the iCalendar URL as
well as this means you are less likely to miss CFP deadlines in future:
https://freertc.org/events.ics

We've experimented with keeping the CFP as a Markdown document and
converting it to text (for email) using this tool:
https://cloudconvert.com/md-to-txt

Does anybody know a better command line tool?

One further idea I had for getting past spam filters: asking the leaders
of each project to forward the message on their own lists.  This makes
it a bit more personal for each project but it also means more people
have to make some manual effort.

Regards,

Daniel


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