administriva: new informational posting for the digest.

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

a new informational posting will start appearing shortly; here is the first
draft, which is offered both for comments/requests from the digest readership
and as it may answer some questions that come up with considerable
regularity.

richard
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[revised 10/08/1999, rpw]

These general notes on using the mailing list are posted on
the 1st and 15th of each month.

1) Why don't my postings go through?

    there are several things that may interfere with postings
    making it to the list.

   a) are you a member?

       some read the ftp archives rather than receiving the list
       in email.  in order to post to the list, you need to contact
       me (rwelty@domain.elided) and get me to add your name
       to the list of "permitted senders".

   b) has your email address changed?

       some of you have had changes in your email address. your old
       address still works, and is still on the list, but your From:
       line shows a new address. this can happen for various reasons;
       you may have changed jobs or ISPs, and left a forward in place,
       or your IT staff may have fiddled with the email system.

       you will need to unsubscribe your old email address and subscribe
       the new one. this may require my involvement, if you can't figure
       out a way to get your old address off the list using the conventional
       majordomo commands. you can use the majordomo "which" command to
       probe for old addresses. send a message to majordomo@domain.elided
       with one or more which commands in the body, one per line. to
       check for potential addresses for Fred Flinstone, formerly of
       bedrock.org, the following commands can be sent:

          which flintstone
          which bedrock

       note that the matches above might return any of the following
       addresses, if they appear in the list (in other words, you can
       use vagueness and incompleteness in your recollection as a tool):

            Fred.Flinstone@domain.elided
            fflinstone@domain.elided
            flintstonef@domain.elided

   c) do you have more than one email address?

       if so, only the subscribed addresses can post, unless you contact
       me (see 1)a) above for relevant information)

   d) are you using (intentionally or accidentially) special "features"
      of your mail client?

       formats such as html, rtf, and the like, are blocked as they
       don't work well in digest format and annoy many readers of the
       digest. most kinds of attachments are blocked for similar
       reasons -- binaries, word documents, and excel spreadsheets are
       simply not good things to send to the digest. virtual business
       cards are blocked as well. you need to turn off any special
       features of this type to get your mail through the digest.

   e) are your posts too large?

       there is a 10,000 character limit on posting sizes; this is done
       for various reasons. you can always split up large postings to
       get mail through.

   f) are you including majordomo commands at the start of your message?

       administrivia control is turned on; this is a trap for things
       like "unsubscribe" at the start of a message. try to avoid obvious
       majordomo commands in the subject and the first 10 lines, or
       misspell them in obvious ways (e.g. unzubscribe, 1ndex, h3lp, etc.)

2) why can't i unsubscribe?

   a) has your email address changed?

       majordomo has no way of knowing that Fred.Flinstone@domain.elided was
       once fflintstone@domain.elided.  you can check this with the which
       command (see 1)b) above for details)

   b) are you using the right address?

       send to majordomo@domain.elided, and the format is

        unsubscribe list-name my-email-address

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