[Sosfbay-discuss] is this working?

[cls at truffula.sj.ca.us]

Yes.  This electronic mailing list "belongs" to
Tian Harter and myself.  It runs on a computer the
Green Party of California rents, in Santa Rosa.
The list is managed by GNU Mailman 2.1, one of
the Internet's most popular email list management
software packages.  Underneath Mailman, we use
a very solid software package called Postfix to receive the
postings and broadcast the copies to each subscriber.
Postfix keeps a log of everything in or out,
for a couple of weeks.

There's a standard address for owners of Internet
mailing lists.  sosfbay-discuss-owner at cagreens.org,
in this case, forwards to both of us.

Over the years, GP mailing lists have been plagued
with marginally abusive posters, and we've evolved some
rules you may not have seen before.  Most of our lists
reject postings with more than one or two addresses
showing in their "To" or "Cc" header fields.
That's because of one of the more common abuses.
Rude people would list sosfbay-discuss (etc) among
dozens of other addresses, including other mailing lists.
Then careless people would hit that big, colorful
"Reply-to-all" button, and all of a sudden all those
addresses would be conscripted into a giant, ad-hoc
"mailing list" with no way to unsubscribe.  And the
messages on such lists tend to be stuff nobody wants.
The limit on "To" and "Cc" keeps sosfbay-discuss
out of those pile-ups.  If what you wrote is worth
fifty people's time to read, it is worth a few seconds
of your time to save it in your "drafts" folder and
then send a copy to here alone.  If you're in the habit
of using "Reply-to-all," fine.  Just *add* the habit of
deleting all those extra recipient addresses from the
new message before you send it.

We also have the same problem every other email operation
in the world faces.  Over 99% of email messages sent are
junk.  Identity theft attempts, sugar pills from India,
hostile software that attacks Microsoft Windows systems.
We try to avoid rejecting it by its *content*, and focus
instead on its *origin* and subtle mistakes the spammers'
software makes that legitimate software doesn't.
That way we can discuss women's freedom and health
issues that would trigger "parental controls" on a
consumer entertainment oriented service.  Among other things.

Sometimes legitimate senders' software makes those
same mistakes and we reject their messages.  That's
called a "false positive."  Your software always tells you
what we said the reason was, but there are lots of numbers
and punctuation marks surrounding it and it's easy to miss.
Usually the rejection contains the URL
http://www.greens.org/delist where you can paste in
that reason, and we can get started fixing our problem
or finding a way to work around yours.  Since the email
is completely under our control, we can just about always
accommodate any peculiar sender, *once we know there's
a problem*.  We've got options no commercial email provider has.
So when your email doesn't go through, fill out the form.


Cameron
"postmaster" at cagreens.org