Summary: retire the mysterious and largely unused tor-team mailing list
Background
The tor-team mailing list is this mysterious list that is an "Internal discussion list" (like tor-internal) but "externally reachable" according to our list documentation.
Proposal
Retire the tor-team@lists.torproject.org mailing list. This means
simply deleting the mailing list from Mailman, as there are no
archives.
This will be done in two weeks (2025-11-24) unless an objection is raised, here or in the discussion issue.
More information
"Externally reachable", in this case, probably means that mails from people not on the mailing list are accept instead of rejected outright, although it's unclear what that actually meant at the time.
Actually, the list is configured to allow mails from non-members, but those mails are held for moderation. It's unclear why we would allow outside email to tor-internal; there are many and better mechanisms to communicate with the core team, ranging from GitLab, the Discourse Forum, RT, and so on.
Concretely, as far as we can tell, the list is unused. We noticed the existence of the list while doing the rotation of the human resources director.
Also, the lists memberships have wildly diverged (144 members on tor-internal, 102 on tor-team), so we're not onboarding people properly on both lists.
Here are other stats about the list:
- Created at: 15 Apr 2016, 11 a.m.
- Last post at: 3 Jun 2025, 6:38 p.m.
- Digest last sent at: 4 Jun 2025, noon
- Volume: 66
In other words, the list hasn't sent any email in over 5 months at this point. Before that email from gus, the last email was from 2022.
Compare that to the "normal" tor-internal list:
- Created at: 25 Mar 2011, 6:14 p.m.
- Last post at: 6 Nov 2025, 11:20 a.m.
- Digest last sent at: 6 Nov 2025, noon
- Volume: 177