hi all,
we have incorporated a small change to the rules when people get (semi-)automatically unsubscribed from the various pd-lists:
we have started to unsubscribe everybody of whom we are aware of that they mark Pd-list mails as SPAM.
background: the various Pd-lists have a lot of subscribers. this means that the mailinglist servers have a relatively high sending frequency. some subscribers come and stay. others find more interersting stuff to do. people who are not very interested in the current ramblings on the Pd-lists have a few options:
- ignore (and/or delete) mails received from the Pd-list.
- set their delivery options to "no" (so they are technically still
subscribed to the mailinglist, but won't receive any emails)
- unsubscribe from the mailinglist.
some people have also found a 4th way:
- mark emails from the Pd-lists as "SPAM", so they are automatically
filtered by their provider.
now the last option imposes a bit of a problem on the usefulness of the entire Pd-list, since marking these legitimate emails¹ as SPAM has consequences such as:
- (distributed) spam filter algorithms learn that Pd-lists' emails are
(likely to be) spam.
- the mailservers used for distributing the mailinglist get a
reputation as "sending SPAM" and end up on various blacklists (so these mailservers can no longer distribute legit emails).
both consequences mean that delivery of mailinglist emails does not only stop for the original user (who assumedly wants to get rid of Pd-lists' mails) but also for other people using the same provider and/or whose providers use the same anti-spam systems. we are optimistically assuming that most of these "other" people subscribed to the mailinglists do want to receive these emails. thus, marking (legit) Pd-list emails as SPAM actively harms the communication channels of these "other" people.
in order to keep everybody happy, we have decided to unsubscribe everybody who tags Pd-list emails as SPAM (as reported by the SPAM-reporting monitoring services some of the major hosters provide²).
while this keeps harm (hopefully) low, it cannot completely undo all negative consequences. therefore i would like to ask you to never tag legit emails as SPAM.
if you are no longer interested in emails from the Pd-lists, please *unsubscribe yourself*. Every email from the mailinglist contains the information to do that, both in the headers and the body of the email.
thank you for your understanding,
happy patching.
fgasmdr IOhannes
¹ admittedly there has been the occasional "real" SPAM on the mailinglist, though i cannot remember more than probably a dozen (compared to more than 100k emails in total). ² obviously we cannot unsubscribe people who tag their emails as SPAM and of which we no nothing.