[okfn-help] Privacy policy, registration, mailman config

Fri Feb 17 11:47:10 UTC 2012

On 02/16/2012 11:36 AM, Mark Wainwright wrote:
> Rufus asked me to raise this on okfn-help. In brief, we're sending out
> newsletters (such as the new datahub one) which raise 3 issues, (i)
> our published privacy policy, (ii) thedatahub.org's sign-up procedure,
> and (iii) mailman configuration.
> 
> thedatahub.org links on every page to a Privacy Policy, which is the
> standard okfn one:
> 
> http://okfn.org/privacy-policy/
> 
> This is not fit for purpose as it stands. The Datahub collects an
> e-mail address when you register, and we are therefore required to say
> what we will do with this information. In practice we have recently
> started sending out an occasional DataHub newsletter. (As you can see
> below not everyone is happy about this.) We need to do two things:
> 
> (i) change the privacy policy to mention this and specify
> unsubscription information,
> 
> (ii) change the sign-up procedure on the datahub so that, when giving
> an e-mail address, the user can opt in or out of receiving newsletters
> (eg with a check-box)
> 
> I believe both of these are legal requirements under data protection laws.

Also, sending out mails to a lot of people who have not explicitly opted
in/subscribed increases dramatically the risk of the OKFN mail server
getting blacklisted, which would be quite painful.

> Cases like the chap below show that it would also help if recipients
> of newsletters etc could see at a glance what e-mail address they had
> been sent to (this need not be the same as the one at which it is
> received or read). (He suggested this in subsequent correspondence.)

(I know this is not a solution and only works for geeks, but one can
usually tell from a mail's "Received:" headers which mail address a post
was received on)

> It seems from this page that this is possible in Mailman 2.1 (which we
> are using):
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/faq.html
> 
> However, it requires a sysadmin to have configured the mm_cfg.py file
> suitably, namely with
> 
> OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION = Yes
> 
> It seems that this has not been done to judge from this list of
> currently allowed substitutions:
> 
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/admin/datahub-news/?VARHELP=nondigest/msg_footer
> 
> It would be great if someone could make the necessary change to the
> mailman config.

I looked into this. The documentation says:

   OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION

   Set this variable to Yes to allow list owners to set the "persona-
   lized" flags on their mailing lists.  Turning these on tells Mailman
   to send separate email messages to each user instead of batching
   them together for delivery to the MTA.  This gives each member a
   more personalized message, but can have a heavy impact on the
   performance of your system.

In our case, the mailing list "datahub-news" has 5750 subscribers, but
only on 700 distinct mail domains. If we switched on personalisation
that would result in 8x more deliveries, significantly increasing the
load on our mail server.

All in all i recommend that we do not send bulk/mass mail via our
current mailman. Either we use some external service like mail chimp, or
we set up a bulk mailer which seperates the risk of getting blacklisted
and the operational risk from mail.okfn.org.

/nils.

-- 
See http://nils.toedtmann.net/ for contact details.