[SVSList] SVS Mailing Lists? Answers to your questions...

[John Hinton]

Hi Everybody,

To try to clean up a bit of the confusion......

First, the old mailing list program was a flyweight program from the 
start. It had many limitations but served us well. In recent months, 
spammers had started pounding on the lists addresses. This is referred 
to as 'bounce spamming'. They would use as the from address the address 
they were actually trying to spam. The old program would bounce the 
message to the 'from' address.. so we were being used as a spamming 
tool. This is commonplace these days.

The new mailing list is a front line application instead of a program 
run down in a user directory. What this means is the email can be 
handled in ways more like the actual server's mailserver. The options 
available are fantastic although so indepth that some of the decisions 
can be a bit daunting.

At present, it is set up to allow requests for subscription, but each 
has to be first verified by the subscriber and then approved by Fred. 
This is to keep spammers from signing up and spamming the list. It also 
has abilities to handle automatically those emails sent to the list by 
non-subscribers so we are bouncing spam back out onto the internet.... 
or to me (I was getting around 100 messages per day.. yuck!)

Another nice feature is it will unsubscribe any email address after 
three bounces. There have been quite a few addresses which have for one 
reason or another changed or had filled quotas. It's not so great to get 
all the bounces from these as the admin... Now the program will take 
care of that.

It has many other nice user features.

It's password protected as you have likely noticed. To start out, it 
generates a password for you and sends out the notice when I added you 
to the mailing list. It then sends out a reminder on the first day of 
each month. (There are two public SVS mailing list so some of your have 
received four notice in the last two days.. don't worry, it'll be a 
month before you get another one) You can set this password to whatever 
you like, just visit the link provided in your email or at the bottom of 
this and all list emails.

You have the option of 'digest mode'. In digest mode, all the emails 
from a day are compiled into one email and sent just once. This is 
useful for busy mail lists. SVS normally isn't all that busy.. so you 
may not be interested in this.

There is a 'postpone' feature. If you're going away on vacation and in 
particular if you are going to set a vacation autoresponder, please 
'postpone' mailing from the list. What this does is simply turn off the 
sending of list mail to you until you remove the postpone. We've not had 
a vacation message error yet, but when they happen they aren't pretty. 
It forms what is know as an email loop. A message goes out to the 
mailing list, your autoreply sends back to the list, which is then sent 
back out to you, to which your autoreply sends an autoreply.......... 
and by now you scientists can see the loop. The mailing list program 
itself has some support against this, but is not infallible in this regard.

So, there you have it. This is what has been going on. Things have 
changed a bit, but all for the good. This mailing list program Mailman 
has been around for a long time and is a standard part of our webserver 
packages, therefore is updated immediately should any security issues 
arise. So, hopefully we'll get a lot of years out of it just as we did 
with the old program.

Best,
John Hinton
webmaster at ew3d.com
http://ew3d.com