[sac-dev] Mailing list problem

[James Wookey]

Dear all,

The other alternative would be to scrap any mention of mailing lists,  
and simply direct the user to the main SAC web-page for help/bug  
reporting etc. From there it is easy to maintain up to date  
instructions for joining the mailing list, or further information.


> 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 of developer time and is likely to become outdated again at some  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/
>> _______________________________________________
>> sac-dev mailing list
>> sac-dev at iris.washington.edu
>> http://www.iris.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/sac-dev
>>
>                                    George Helffrich
>                                    george at geology.bristol.ac.uk
>
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