VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2007 - 14:46:47 CDT

Hi,
  I wanted to respond to Irene's question about a delayed VMD-L posting
and also announce some changes to the way the mailing list moderation
will occur.

Irene, I was on vacation a few days and so when I returned I had to manually
allow some VMD-L some posts that were being blocked due to size/content,
or lack of membership to the mailing list, and that's why it showed up
on the mailing list a day or two after the fact...

Going forward I will not be able to manually accept/reject automatically
blocked VMD-L postings anymore, due to the large volume of spam attempts
we get.

During the time I was away (about 10 days) VMD-L got around 2,000 attempted
spams, and in order to approve postings from people that aren't
members of VMD-L, or are posting to the mailing list from a different address
than they are subscribed from, I have to wade through all of the attempted
posts from spammers and the like in order to manually approve the
automatically blocked/filtered VMD-L postings.

>From here on out I'm planning to let non-subscribed posts be
blocked, and posts that are exceed the maximum size range etc will also
be blocked. This will save me a lot of time which I'll now be able to
spend on answering VMD questions and improving the program further.

For 99.9% of the VMD-L members this change will not be noticable,
but I've been silently doing a favor for those people that occasionally
post from a number of email addresses that are not the one they are
actually subscribed with. From now on these posts will be silently
blocked. If you send an email to VMD-L and don't get any response,
you may want to make sure that your mail was not blocked/filtered for
one of the reasons I mention above. Blocked/filtered emails do not appear
in the VMD-L email archive, so it is pretty easy to determine whether
or not your message went out.

At some point I may change VMD-L to use a more sophisticated list manager
package, so suggestions along those lines are welcome. This is your list,
and I am happy to hear comments and suggestions from everyone on improving it.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 12:40:01PM -1000, Irene Newhouse wrote:
>
> This just showed up in my mailbox. I'm not sure how or why, because it's an issue that was already settled for me by the kind people on this list. So please ignore it - it's a ghost message.
>
> Oddly enough, that's the kind of day I'm having today! A day where you say, "Typical!" when something like this happens.
>
> Irene 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078