[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> admin note/RFC: 'antispam' services and nettime

[Benjamin Geer <ben@beroul.uklinux.net>]

On Thursday 13 February 2003 5:57 am, nettime's_janitors wrote:
> but a better solution, we think, is to automatically unsubscribe anyone
> subscriber who misconfigures a spam-blocking account. if the person values
> nettime (or any other affected list), then s/he can sort out the problem;
> if not, oh well.

As someone who administers a lot of lists, I agree completely.  As the number 
of subscribers (and lists) per list admin increases, the list admin simply 
cannot scale well enough to sort out everyone's subscription and mail 
delivery issues for them.  I do my best, particularly when a subscriber 
knows there's a problem, and writes to the admin address to ask for help.  In 
general, though, I think the only practical approach is to remind people to 
heed the advice of RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) [1] -- 'It is your 
responsibility to learn how the lists work' -- and to unsubscribe them when 
you can't send them email because their Hotmail inbox is full, or when their 
'I'm on vacation' message is spamming everyone who posts to the list, etc.

In practice, someone who cares about receiving mail from nettime will surely 
notice that they haven't received any in a while, and will either suspect 
that their spam filter is at fault, or at least ask the nettime moderators 
for help.

I'd recommend putting something in the 'welcome to nettime' email, in all 
caps with lots of asterisks around it, asking people to make sure that mail 
from nettime will get through their spam filter.

You could even have two addresses for writing to the nettime admins: the 
standard one, which would just send an auto-reply containing a nettime FAQ 
(including the info about spam filters), and another, harder-to-find one for 
people whose question isn't in the FAQ.

Ben

[1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html


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