330974 - lists.mozilla.org Mailman Spam filter contents vanish weekly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations: Projects, task, P1)

Description

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

I administer [e-mail], 
also known as [e-mail]

I have setup mailmain 2.1.5's spam filter set up to detect and
DISCARD emails whose subjects contain certain spam keywords using the 
regular expressions, as shown in bug 330973.

Trouble is, that about once a week, when I go to look at it, I see that
the contents of the spam filter have been completely deleted.  Gone. 
No regular expressions left, and the action has been changed from 
DISCARD to HOLD.  

This would be more serious except that bug 330973 renders the contents
of these spam filters moot anyway.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This still happening?

Comment 2

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Shortly after filing this bug, I did some experimentation that proved that
the loss of the spam filters was occurring as a side effect of traversing 
the admin pages.  

I would login as list admin, check to see that the spam filters were 
in place (they were).  Without making any changes to them, I would then
click on other links to visit other admin pages, and then after visiting
quite a few, I would come back to check on the spam filters, and find that
they were all gone.  I concluded that visiting some page clears those 
filters as a side effect, but I did not determine the exact transision
(from page, to page) that causes it.  

I wonder if it's possible that all that list admin data is being kept in 
browser cookies while I'm doing admin stuff, and some page is resetting
that cookie, so that the loss of the data is invisible to me.

I tried one other trick.  The spam filter page lets you define multiple
filters, each consisting of multiple regular expressions.  So, I duplicated
the one filter I was using, making 3 identical filters, in hopes that if 
I lost one, the others would still persist.  

But to tell the truth, about April 1, I reconfigured the list to discard
alll non-member email.  Since then, I've gotten no email about messages
needing moderation, and so I haven't been visiting the admin pages very
often.  Consequently, the content of my spam filter hasn't been lost since
I did that (changed it to discard all non-member emails).  

I guess that's a long way of saying that the loss of spam filters doesn't
matter very much while they are effectively disabled.  If/when bug 330973
is resolved, and spam filters are put back to use again, this bug may 
again become relevant.

Comment 3

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Just checked again today.  Spam filters vanished, all 3 sets of them.

Comment 4

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

A year later, let's try again.

This still happening?

Comment 5

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Hasn't happened recently, but then I almost never visit the admin pages
any more.  I'll reopen this bug if it recurs.