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Re: Please stop sending email to ...


Just to be clear:  The intent of my email was to actually save people
from going to the pointless exercise of trying to contact Corinna or
Larry directly since it won't work.

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 04:42:36PM -0700, Someone Who Took Personal Offense About General Advice wrote:
>Christopher Faylor-8 wrote
>> I know that this is a pointless exercise but I'll say it anyway: people
>> who think that they can have a private chat with Corinna or Larry by
>> sending email to what seem to be their private email addresses will just
>> show up in the spam trap, possibly even causing spamassassin to think
>> that they are a spammer.
>> 
>> We mention in multiple places that cygwin-related issues should go to
>> this list.  So, please don't bother trying to send private email unless
>> you've been specifically asked to do so.  You'll also be doing me a
>> favor because I won't have to spend time cleaning out the spam traps.
>
>Well, here goes nothing. 
>
>I am happy to admit that I'm one of those persons.  The problem is
>exactly that what you claim we "should do" versus what is actually
>possible to do.  If any of the list maintainers had actually bothered
>to try to register to these email lists, you would probably have found
>out that your spam filters are set so high, that it is impossible for
>normal people to even register to these lists!

FYI, The Cygwin list has 1212 subscribers with 89 new joiners since
January 1.  I'm the "list maintainer" and I'm obviously registered.
The same software that handles Cygwin also handles gcc.gnu.org and
sourceware.org.  There are many other mailing lists under those
domains, and some of them have even more subscribers.

I told you why your mail was blocked, indicated that I took steps to
correct the action, and told you were to send email if you had further
problems.  You have not availed yourself of that channel since I told
you about it (you did try to send email there prior to that point
though).  If you really do want to get to the bottom of your email
issues then please start a dialog with cygwin-owner or postmaster.
You'll still be talking to me but you won't be using this list for your
non-cygwin concerns.

You'd mentioned that you hadn't received notification that you'd been
subscribed so I checked on that.  You subscribed to cygwin-allow.  Our
mailing list software doesn't send confirmation notice when signing up
for *-allow.  It does when you actually subscribe.  So, since you aren't
subscribed to the actual cygwin list (under this email address at least)
you wouldn't have seen a subscription ACK.

But, anyway, subscribing to cygwin-allow or cygwin itself would only
slightly relax the spam checking.  It wouldn't have helped with the spam
block that you were seeing.  That required manual intervention on my
part.  As I said, I fixed that.

>So to conclude, it is really your own fault that people are desperate
>to try to contact anyone on this list, to help them out.

You're assuming facts not in evidence.  There was a specific email that
prompted one of my periodic reminders not to try to send private email
but it was not in *any* way a plaintive request for help.

But, regardless, if you think about it, sending email to
someone@cygwin.com because you are frustrated about being spam blocked
when sending to somethingelse@cygwin.com doesn't make a whole lot of
sense.  What does make sense is following the link at the bottom of
http://cygwin.com/lists.html which leads you to:

https://sourceware.org/lists.html#faqs

If you follow that list then you get to:

https://sourceware.org/lists.html#spam

which *does* tell you where to send email if you feel you are being
inappropriately blocked.

>Good Luck and Best Wishes,
>
>Gene Rederer
>(CEO, developer and Cygwin user since ~10 years)

Same to you.

Chris Faylor
Kernel Programmer, Cygwin Contributor for 17 years, Cygwin Maintainer
for 16 years, and Schmuck who spends a lot of time doing complicated
stuff for people for free

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