plug at plug policy issues [was: Re: [plug] [rant] 2.6 Kernels]

[Alex Nordstrom]

On Wednesday, 1 Sep 2004 17:30, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <200409011717.40903.alexander.nordstrom at tpg.com.au>
>
> on Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 05:17:40PM +0800, Alex Nordstrom wrote:
> > (Apologies to James for causing you extra work; I'm generally used
> > to lists which are open for all without approval needed for
> > non-subscribers and saw no indication of plug's MO being different.
> > Should be fixed now.
>
> [ Thanks for that. I had begun preparing the following e-mail
> off-list, but will send it on-list now that you have raised it :-P ]
>
> I'm pretty sure I had a look your Mailman subscription options last
> time, and saw that the 'nodupes' flag was set for you. This means
> that if people send CCs to you, Mailman will graciously suppress the
> list copy (you will receive the e-mail only once). I like this
> feature, as I have personally always disliked being the recipient
> duplicate copies. [Sound effect: lots of hissing at the PINE e-mail
> client.]

That's much appreciated. I do go to excessive lengths to suppress 
off-list replies, including a plea in my signature and setting the 
Reply-To to the list. Would you believe in spite of this, some 
correspondents on other lists still go through the trouble of 
*manually* adding me to the recipient list? Hence the extreme measure 
of munging my address where possible. Again, sorry for the extra work 
this caused.

Pine does seem to be a culprit in many cases, but I got a lot of 
criticism for suggesting this on another list; apparently (at least new 
versions of) Pine can be configured to work properly. Thunderbird is 
another name that keeps popping up, which is rather sad.

> On the topic of whether PLUG's MO is indicated, I was under the
> impression that the list server would have been sending you e-mails
> saying "your message has been held for approval". The reason for this
> approval process to filter out all the SPAM (sometimes we get so much
> that the administrative web page falters due to HTTP timeouts).

I've not received those. (Perhaps they were sent to the munged address?) 
I think if I were in that position, I'd reject messages from 
non-subscribers outright (I believe some KDE lists do this) or try to 
set up some spam filtering (the open Debian lists filter out over 90% 
of posts as spam, according to some reports).

> As for whether it is any trouble for me, well, there are nominally
> two other plug at plug administrators with whom I share the load. Right,
> Craig? ;-)

In that case, I also apologise to anyone else I've inconvenienced.

-- 
Alex Nordstrom
http://lx.n3.net/
Please do not CC me in followups; I am subscribed to plug.