Mailing Lists
From FGVwiki
Free Geek Vancouver Mail Lists
Access
Free Geek maintains a number of email list for topical and general discussion and announcements. Subscribing to the lists is a good way of staying up to date with Free Geek.
fg-general
The primary list is fg-general, our general mailing list. To subscribe go here: fg-general
fg-announce
If you would like to receive announcements, but do not wish to follow all of the discussion, the fg-announce list is for official announcements only: fg-announce
Other Lists
A number of other lists exist for discussion of specific topics. Most are low volume. They can be browsed here: listinfo
Online archives of all the lists are available through the web interface.
Policy
Conduct
Mailing list users are expected to abide by our community policies:
Participation is a privilege, and decorum is a shared responsibility. Subscribers neglecting to respect our community standards may lose participation privileges.
Lists only accept messages from subscribers
Your Address must be subscribed to the list before you can send mail
For users with multiple email accounts, it is possible to subscribe every account and only enable mail receipt on the primary account.
If you are worried about a message you sent, you can look for it in the list archives. It can take several minutes until it appears. It is also possible to configure the list to send you a confirmation; do this through the web interface.
Rationale
Due to abuse by spammers the lists are configured to silently drop mail sent by addresses that are not subscribed to the list.
The list addresses are widely publicized and attract an astounding amount of spam. Some of it can be filtered out, but any spam reaching the lists drastically reduces their usability and membership.
It is reasonable to refuse mail from unknown addresses, but why drop the messages with no indication to the sender that their mail has not made it to the list?
This harsh policy is due to the common spammer practice of forging From: headers in their spam. Many of these scumbags use real addresses for this purpose. If we bounce these messages, we are effectively relaying the spam and certainly contributing to the problem.
Industry best practice is to never bounce spam messages.
Ok, so bouncing is out of the question, why can we not just hold these messages for moderation?
I mentioned the astounding volume of spam. Every couple of months, someone seems to get bitten by this setting. That is, maybe half a dozen incidents a year, or less. The honeypot account on the mail server has 378,318 messages in its spool at time of writing. That means an administrator might have to wade through as many as 60,000 spam messages to find one users rejected mail. It's actually worse than that as many spam runs target all of the list accounts so the administrator might have to delete 20 copies of each spam. That's as bad as 1.2 million messages for every false negative.
So far I have been unable to convince anyone to volunteer to take on this task.
Mail from the list has the Reply-To: field set to the poster
If you hit reply in response to a message from one of the lists, most mail clients will address the response to the original poster, not the list.
This is annoying to people and can prevent replies reaching the list.
Using the Reply-To-All button in your mail client when replying to a list message will solve this problem.
Rationale
The reason for this behavior is the principle of least damage.
With the lists set up this way, a user making a mistake sends a message intended for the public to a private individual.
The alternative, reply-to-list, means that a user making a mistake sends a message intended for a private individual to a public list.
While in the first case it is easier to make mistakes, errors are merely annoying. In the second case errors can have devastating effects on the list and on the parties involved.
The solution to the first situation is to resend the message to the list. In the second situation, there may be no solution. Secrets can not be taken back.
The List software strips attachments
Email attachments are removed from list messages.
URLs to files hosted elsewhere can be used instead of attachments.
Many types of documents can be represented as plain text inline.
Rationale
Many people subscribe to our lists. Some of these people are on dial-up or mobile devices where large attachments pose more than a minor annoyance.
Mail attachments can contain malware.
Many subscribers have little more than a passing interest in Free Geek, if we want to keep them as subscribers we should avoid annoying them by filling their inboxes with our files.
Free Geek maintains a wiki and a subversion (Version control system) server. These are appropriate for sharing files.
HTML mail is converted to plain text
HTML is automatically processed into plain text by the list software.
Rationale
Some mail clients don't handle HTML all that well.
HTML mail can be a vector for various types of attacks.
Allowing arbitrary HTML in the online archives is a serious security risk.
Posts to the list must be To: or CC: the list address
Messages sent to a list must include the list address in either the To: or CC: header. BCC: does not work
Rationale
This policy ensures that all parties to a communication are aware that the communication is taking place publicly. List messages are archived and available to the public. This can include quoted text from earlier exchanges in the thread.
Refusing messages BCC:'d to the list helps ensure transparency to all parties.
Posts to the list may have a maximum of ten other recipients
Messages sent to a list may have no more than ten recipients listed in the To: and CC: fields in total.
Rationale
This policy is an anti-spam measure. This is a cheap and simple way to filter inane and off topic forwards sent by users with a poor grasp of netiquette to their entire address book.
If you do need to send a message to a list as well as a long list of other addresses, send the mail twice, once to the list and once to the other users. This is extra work on the sender's part, but it helps to keep the list clear of garbage that wastes the time of, and annoys, our hundreds of subscribers.
