Re: My delayed complaint about spam on this list

[Frank Farance <frank@farance.com>]

On 2018-06-04 15:47, James Darnley wrote:
> 
> It isn't very nice to put "please email cygwin@cygwin.com" in error and warning messages then deny people the opportunity to send the email. "Please register first" is annoying as shit.  I have certainly not reported bugs to lists that make me do that.  The same applies to bug trackers.
> 
> > If you would like to reply to me, please send your response to me directly, DO NOT SEND TO THE LIST.  I will summarize back to the list. (Think: Old-School 1980s USENET unix-wizards kinda framework.)
> 
> No thanks.  I wish to discuss this openly.

James-

First, my offer to have responses sent to me was a courtesy to the list ... some people would prefer to have this kind of Mailing List Mechanics discussion off line.  No problem having it discussed openly, I'm fine with that, too.

Second, as a mailing list admin myself, at some time we're going to have to deal with spam as some of the members E-mail systems will start tagging normal cygwin stuff as spam, which is the kind of stuff members don't have control over in medium-to-large organizations.  Again, I've heard all these *legitimate* concerns over several decades.

Third, I believe a registration mechanism (just your E-mail address) is necessary for discussion: How would you be getting follow-up messages if you're not on the list?  And E-mail clients may prefer Reply-To-List rather than Reply-All, which means even if people were CCing you, at some point you start missing discussion from others.

So given the choice between:

(1) getting rid of spam by restricting senders to members of the list (which, as you state, might lose people like you)

versus

(2) reducing spam for the 1500 members on the list (yet still lose you because you need to become a member of the list to see the responses from others),

THEN: in both cases we still wind up losing you (either you don't give your E-mail address to the list server or you're not included in the follow-up E-mails because you're not a member), ... YET in the latter case we reduce spam ...

THUS, cygwin should restrict sending to just the members because (1) it will reduce spam, and (2) we're still going to lose people like you who don't want to put their name on the list - regardless of which spam reduction mechanisms is chosen.

Make sense?

-FF

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