[sac-dev] Mailing list problem

[Kuang He]

Hi all,

Actually, this is something related to sac-help mailing list, but
since it is a development issue, I thought it should be more
appropriate to post it here.

In a lot of SAC documents, such as README, doc/README, configure
--help, any help pages, etc. you can see words like this:

    If you experience problems at any stage please report the issue to
sac-help at iris.washington.edu

However, nowadays one has to subscribe to that mailing list first in
order to be able to send an email to it asking for help. Otherwise,
the mailing list system will _silently_ drop the emails from the
queue. I found out about this the hard way, having two of my emails
dropped when I tried to send a message to sac-help without being a
subscriber. One of the mailing list managers Tim Knight told me that:

   The IRIS mailing lists were more open a couple of years ago until
we starting getting a huge number of spam messages, so the policy on
most mailing lists was to close the lists to subscribers only.

Therefore, I was wondering if we need to add something like

    For further information, go to
http://www.iris.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/sac-help

to each instance where sac-help is mentioned, or maybe kindly ask the
mailing list managers to at least let the system REJECT emails (using
an SMTP error code) rather than silently DISCARD them, or both.


Best regards,

-- 
Kuang He
Department of Physics
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269-3046

Tel: +1.860.486.4919
Web: http://www.phys.uconn.edu/~he/