Mailing lists

Skazka - Russian Society of Trondheim >

Mailing lists

skazka-info@skazka.no Current subscribers	- announcements of all upcoming events; general discussion. Open to anybody. Please subscribe, this is the best way to stay informed. Average number of messages per week: 4 (statistics from the period August 2000 - February 2001; it hasn't changed much since that)
skazka-board@skazka.no Current subscribers	- discussion between board members and other people who are closely interested in the club life. Open to anybody. Please use this list if you want to ask questions about the club. Average number of messages per week: less than 2

To post to the mailing list, simply send an email to one of the addresses above after making sure that

150 busy people really should get your message, in case you send it to skazka-info
You use English or transliterated Russian (transliterirovannyj russkij; Cyrillic <=> Translit converter).
Don't use Russian characters, because they cannot be correctly displayed on more computers than you'd believe.
Don't use Norwegian, because not everyone can read it.
Your email has a meaningful title (Subject field)

There are two ways to unsubscribe from or subscribe to the mailing lists.

You can send email to makarov@vad1.com asking me (i.e. a human) to do that.

Or you can manage your subscription yourself by sending emails to the robot. By the way, this is exactly what I would have to do after receiving your email, anyway.

Robot's email is majordomo@skazka.no. Yes, when you subscribe or unsubscribe, you send email exactly to majordomo@skazka.no and not to any other address. You should put commands in the body (not in the subject line) of your message:

To subscribe, use command
```
subscribe <mailing list name> [<your email address>]
```
Example of email that will subscribe your address onto skazka-info mailing list:
```
To      : majordomo@skazka.no
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
subscribe skazka-info
```
You can also specify explicitly the address to subscribe if you are sending email not from the account that should be subscribed. Example:
```
To      : majordomo@skazka.no
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
subscribe skazka-info artem@stud.ntnu.no
```
(put your email address instead of artem@stud.ntnu.no, of course)

To unsubscribe, use the command unsubscribe instead. Example:

To      : majordomo@skazka.no
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
unsubscribe skazka-info artem@stud.ntnu.no

You will get a confirmation in your mailbox telling you if your command worked.

I'm aware that this is not the most user-friendly way of doing these things today, but it provides us with some important functionality.

Posting restrictions

Attention of those who get a new, or have more than one email address! To protect our mailing lists from unsolicited commercial email (spam), only subscribers to at least one of the lists are allowed to post directly. If the address the message comes from is not subscribed to any of the two lists, your email reaches only webmaster's mailbox. I will forward it into the list you intended to post to, but that causes a delay.

If you want your message to reach the subscribers immediately, please add your new address to a special mailing list (not used for posting) - skazkaaccess - before sending anything from your new address.

You can 'subscribe' your address to skazkaaccess the same way as to real mailing lists (see above). Example:

To      : majordomo@skazka.no
Subject :
----- Message Text -----
subscribe skazkaaccess artem22@hotmail.com

(already subscribed addresses)

This restriction came in handy: spam sent to our lists started bouncing into my mailbox in less than two weeks after they were established. Aparently, a robot visited this page and harvested email addresses. That's not fun.

To put it straight, these measures protect not so much your mailbox as our reputation. Your email address is listed on several pages on this site, where it can be harvested by spammer's spider and used to send you spam, but usually you do not know how they got your address. However, a spam message sent through our mailing list would be a total blow to our ego. My position regarding spam is that one should not try to hide his email, thus hampering useful contacts with him and making himself and those geeks alike in behaviour. We should support a legal (and technical) solution, which will outlaw unsolicited bulk email and make litigation against its sender efficient and profitable.

The maximum allowed size of attachments is 300KB for skazka-info and 2MB for skazka-board. Larger emails will not be forwarded to the list. This restriction was imposed because not everyone has a fast connection and bottomless disk quote. Just think of a user of mail.ru (2MB disk quote) checking his email from a Russian university (less than 1KB/s connection speed) receiving your 1MB+ Christmas card into his mailbox. We do have these users subscribed to skazka-info, and I did see several such 'greetings' stopped by the filter the last Christmas. If you really need to make something big available, send it me and I can place it on our Web site.

Our lists are supported by the Majordomo mailing list manager and are installed on the server of the Department of Computer and Information Science, by courtesy of the department.

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