I'm sending this email out to clarify a few things about how the list is managed, and what is expected of the participants in order to make the list run smoothly and to minimize administrative effort. This list does not allow posting to it by non-subscribers, and it will never allow that. Anyone who wants to post a message on this list, must subscribe to the list either via the website or via the xfree86-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx mechanism, confirm their subscription, and then after receiving the "you are now subscribed" message back from GNU mailman, people are free to post. The reason this is done on this mailing list, like many others, is to filter out the humongous plethora of spam, viruses, unsubscribe messages posted by users to the list instead of done properly, as well as other junk mail sent to it, all of which get trapped by GNU mailman's filters and put in the administrative queue. The overwhelming majority of stuff that gets put in the administrative approval queue, is pure junk, something like 99.9% of it. Due to the volume of this kind of junkmail, the administrative approval queue just gets dumped on the floor and either discarded or rejected in a batch once or twice a week. Any emails posted to the list by non-subscribers gets dumped on the floor unread. Reason being, if someone can't take the time to subscribe first prior to posting, then I can't be bothered to read their posting and approve it, as doing so would just encourage them to not ever subscribe, and would leave me having to then approve one by one all of their followups. That isn't something I consider worthy of spending time doing. If someone wants to be able to post to the list freely, and does not want to receive emails from the list, they can subscribe and configure mailman to not send them mail. The second thing I'd like to note, is that there has been an increase in the last 3-4 months of people's email accounts bouncing due to various reasons including: 1) They no longer work at a company and their email address is disabled 2) They've changed email addresses and their old address isn't working any more 3) They've ran out of disk quota/space 4) Some other random reason. Up until now, mailman was set to disable sending of mail to accounts that bounce, but keep people subscribed. I've changed mailman to unsubscribe people who's email bounces now, so that dead email addresses don't stay subscribed forever. So if anyone finds they aren't getting the list anymore all of a sudden some day, check to make sure you're still subscribed, and resubscribe if you're not and still wish to be. Summary: If anyone posts a message to the list whom is not currently subscribed to the list, it won't ever make it to the list and will never be read by anyone. Subscribe to the list first, confirm it, and then wait until mailman tells you you're subscribed _before_ posting. If anyone wants to be unsubscribed, follow the link at the bottom of every mail posted to the list and unsubscribe yourself. Bouncing email accounts will be unsubscribed automatically without human intervention. The intention of all of these list policies, is to minimize the administrative effort of sifting through bucketloads of junkmail to find individual pleas for help, which can be very time consuming. Other types of administrative mails, which are sent to the admin address however, do get read and handled regularly though. Hope this clarifies a few things for people who have asked privately, as well as others. Feel free to pass the info on. Cordially, The evil xfree86-list administrator _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
