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First off, a handy little form for submitting mailing list requests:
All mailing lists hosted here accept only plain text email. For a explanation of why this is and some hints on how to fix this, go here. Please don't ask us how to fix the problem for your email client. We don't provide that level of support.
Some companies ask employees to include disclaimers on all their emails which say that the mail is confidential, private, or only intended for the recipient. Sending a "private" message to a public mailing list, which is distributed around the world to maybe hundreds or thousands of people and to several publically viewable list archivers is obviously silly.
So to stop anyone saying we're not respecting their requested privacy, we're helpfully guaranteeing it by bouncing any mails we detect with such notices. All mails must be public and without restriction of distribution as a matter of site policy. Some projects like GCC have their own stated policies. We can't always detect every such message, but that does not mean that any that slip through are allowed.
To get your mails accepted, obviously you need to remove these disclaimers or privacy notices. Either turn it off in your mail client for the list address you want to send to, delete it by hand, or if company policy doesn't permit that, get your company to change its policy. If your company servers automatically add it, either persuade your sysadmins to turn it off for the lists, post from home, or use a free web-based e-mail service. There's enough of them out there.
If you think your email has been caught unfairly please contact postmaster with the affected message attached and we'll sort it out. If you want to be a good citizen and report disclaimers which have slipped through the filter, please contact the overseers mailing list at this site.
So, you've discovered the fact that the mailing lists are archived, eh? That's a common internet practice. Where have you been?
If you sent email to a mailing list and put your email address in clear text, it will show up in the archives that way. Ditto for your phone number, social security number, and dental records.
In fact, not only will this information show up on this web site, it will be archived on other sites around the web, too. So, there's little you can do once you've sent this information out over the vast tubes of the internets.
We do not normally edit the content of the archives except to remove viruses. So, if you do not want something read by vast numbers of people do not hit the send key.
First of all, always use the automated unsubscription mechanisms. They're faster and more reliable than the human contact addresses, and to be honest, none of us wants to do work that can be easily handled by computers. If you are subscribed to a cygwin list you can also go here.
If you are, for some reason, averse to using the automated method for unsubscribing, you can also unsubscribe using email. If you are on list somelist, send a mail note to
somelist-unsubscribe@sourceware.orgRemember that your message is being interpreted by a computer not by a person so please use a blank subject and empty content in your message to reduce the risk of your unsubscribe attempt being interpreted as spam.
Your reply will be either a message asking you to confirm that you want to unsubscribe, or an error saying "That address is not subscribed" with a help message on how to use the mailing list commands. If you received the confirmation message, then confirm your unsubscription. If you got the help message, then your current mail address is not the same as the subscribed mail address. For this case, see the next FAQ just below.
Here's a scenario. You subscribed to the list "somelist" while you were in college as eagerstudent@uni.edu. You've since graduated and gone to a corporation, hardworker@bigcorp.com. Mail to your eagerstudent address is forwarded to your new hardworker address. You can't log in to your eagerstudent@uni.edu account any longer, but you want to get off the mailing list.
No problem. Send a mail note to
somelist-unsubscribe-eagerstudent=uni.edu@sourceware.orgHow did I came up with that? I took "eagerstudent@uni.edu", replaced the @ with a =, and then stuck it after the "unsubscribe" command. It's really pretty simple.
If you are succesful, you will get a mail response from the system. Your reply will be either a message asking you to confirm that you want to unsubscribe, or an error saying "That address is not subscribed" with a help message on how to use the mailing list commands. If you received the confirmation message, then confirm your unsubscription. If you got the help message, then you didn't send the right address to sourceware.org. Maybe you're subscribed on a different address? See the next FAQ just below.
There are a few tricks you can do to find out what address you're subscribed under.
If you can examine the mail headers of a message you've received from the mailing list, look for a line called "List-Unsubscribe:". If you're on the mailing list somelist, and the address you're subscribed under happens to be eagerstudent@uni.edu, you should see something like,
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:somelist-unsubscribe-eagerstudent=uni.edu@sourceware.org>
See the "eagerstudent=uni.edu"? This means you're subscribed under the e-mail address eagerstudent@uni.edu. In fact, this shows you the exact email address to use for unsubscribing so you now have enough information to unsubscribe from the list, see Unsubscribing, full.
Assuming the automated mechanisms are not working for you and you've tried to unsubscribe any address you might be subscribed under, you should contact the owner of your mailing list. If you're on a mailing list called somelist, send a note to somelist-owner@sourceware.org.
Include the information from the Unsubscribing, I don't know what e-mail address I'm subscribed under in your email.
For a mailing list that is very high volume (20-30 notes a day), a digest version of that list can be very convenient. When you are on the digest version, you will get a single mail note once a day (or once every 30 messages--which ever comes first) that contains all of the traffic to that mailing list that day.
Digests are less useful on low volume lists (such as most of the announcement lists, which may have one note sent to them per month).
The easiest way to subscribe or unsubscribe from a digest version of a list is to use the mailing list request form earlier on this page.
Like this:
Done!
Using the mailing list request form up above will make the whole process very easy to do.
We use a combination of a custom filter, spamassassin, qpsmtpd, and ClamAV (for virus scanning) to control the flow of idiot junk email to our mailing lists. As of this writing, the vast majority of email to this site is spam. Isn't that a sad state of affairs?
While our filters may cause an occasional problem with well-meaning email, in general there are few cases of the filters returning a "false positive" (or is it actually a "false negative"?). If you are subscribed to a mailing list at sourceware.org or gcc.gnu.org, you will not be subject to some kinds of spam blocking for that mailing list. However, if you are subscribed from one account and post from another then the posting account will be subject to spam block checking. To avoid this, you can put yourself on the "global allow" list for sourceware.org.
To do this, send email from the blocked email account to:
global-allow-subscribe-you=yourdomain.com@sourceware.org.
(where you=yourdomain.com translates to your blocked email address with an "="
substituted for the "@")
This will bypass some spam checking for future submissions to the sourceware.org mailing lists. It will not bypass certain types of checks, like sending email with html or other blocked encodings. You will also not be able to use this technique if your email address is on the site-wide black list. If you do find yourself on this list for some reason, send email to postmaster stating your case.
You can use this technique if you just want to be able to send email to a list without receiving any email from the list. You can also give yourself posting privileges for only an individual list by replacing "global" above with the name of the specific list.
If you have tried all of the above techniques and are still unable to send email to a mailing list, then send email to postmaster at this site. Be prepared to be mocked, if any of the above needs to be repeated to you, however.
We use qmail as our MTA (replacement for sendmail) and ezmlm-idx as our mailing list manager (replacement for majordomo).
We've found qmail and ezmlm-idx to be far superior to sendmail and majordomo. The interfaces to qmail/ezmlm-idx are completely different from sendmail/majordomo, but the benefits of qmail/ezmlm-idx are worth the time it takes to relearn everything.
For a discussion on the SPAM blocking software, see the above entry.
For web archives, We are using MHonarc.
The web server is Apache, the OS is Linux, and the search engine is mnogosearch.