- From: Donald E. Eastlake 3rd <dee@cybercash.com>
- Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 10:05:55 -0500 (EST)
- To: "sunghee ,lee[À̼ºÈñ]" <shlee@ktmp.kaist.ac.kr>, arun@ipent.delhi.nic.in..cybercash.com, Ferrari Claudia <claudia@pinss.unimo.it>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Hello people, I and others are getting a bit sick of the all the subscribe and unsubscribe messages being sent directly to this and other mailing lists. It's really not that hard to do it right. Below is the canned message I sometimes send out to people who seem to be ignorant of the correct technique. PLEASE READ IT. I'm sending this to the whole http-wg list in hopes to forstall dozens of further such messages being send to the entire list. It would be real nice if some software at cuckoo.hpl.hp.com would filter out messages like these subscribe and unsubscribe ones and do something useful with them, rather than just send them out to the mailing list. Donald ===================================================================== Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1 508-287-4877(tel) dee@cybercash.com 318 Acton Street +1 508-371-7148(fax) dee@world.std.com Carlisle, MA 01741 USA +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA) Dear Internet User, Possibly it was just a typo or over sight. Certainly I make mistakes myself. But you should should try to *never* send a message just about subscribing or unsubscribing or other administrivia directly to a distribution list until you have tried other avenues without success. On most mailing lists, sending directly to the list name will cause your request message to be sent out to all the list members and just annoy them. It is quite possible that the list maintainer isn't even on the mail list so they may not see your message. The standard Internet thing to do is to append "-request" to the list name. In this case that would be http-wg-request@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com There are lists maintained by automated software. In such cases, the best address to send to may be like listserv@host.domain or majordomo@host.domain. However, such systems are almost always set up to also intercept "-request" mail and handle it as if you had sent it to the automated software's address. Another alternative is to try sending mail to the postmaster at the site hosting the mailing list. In this case, that would be postmaster@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com Maybe you have already tried these methods. If so you should keep in mind that many lists are maintained by people, not software, so it may take a while to your request to be acted on. It's too bad that people don't put in software to filter out an re-direct recognizable administrative messages even on systems with manual mailing lists. But they don't, so we should all be careful. Donald
Received on Thursday, 1 February 1996 07:12:56 UTC