[sac-dev] Mailing list problem

[George Helffrich]

Dear All -

	The behavior Kuang highlights is certainly unfriendly and impairs 
honest efforts to help.  It would be better if sac-help sent reject 
SMTP responses with a link to to join sac-help.  Putting detailed 
mailing list clerical instructions into code warnings seems wasteful of 
developer time and is likely to become outdated again at some point.

On 12 Sep 2008, at 07:31, Kuang He wrote:

> 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/
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> http://www.iris.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/sac-dev
>
                                     George Helffrich
                                     george at geology.bristol.ac.uk