Hi guys!
Sorry for long post but if you wonder why you aren't getting mails from the mailinglist you will want to read. I am also emailing you people privately.
When I set the mailinglist up I didn't change much of the default settings, which turns out was a mistake. Here goes:
A week back or so there was an initiative to set up forwarding from this forum onto the mailinglist. First this was done using the original poster as sender - but since forum members not necessarily are mailinglist members, that caused a lot of moderation bounces. To remedy this we found out that we could let the Nim forum set the header "Resent-from:" with a special forum sender email, and we could then configure the mailinglist to look at that header in addition to looking at the "From:" header.
Chaos ensues
- The forum address we used has no inbox so after a day or two we realize that we can't get it confirmed as a subscriber. Freelists has Canadian laws to follow so as admin I can't subscribe an address manually. So bounces kept piling up.
- Even worse was the fact that the emails sent by this Nim forum (using Nim SMTP module) didn't include the "Date:" header. It turns out that's bad form and causes spam filters to go into RED ALERT. Or its some other reason too, dunno. Freelist uses Amavisd so it tagged the email as probably spam. Now, those forum members that also were list members did get their posts through to the mailinglist. Now, gmail detected the spam alert (or raised it on its own) and started bouncing. So did outlook.com I think
- The nail in the coffin was the default settings on freelist. Two failed deliveries in a 30 day period was the max allowed before "action was taken". The action turned out to be automatic unsubscribe! So bam, there went 48 subscribers.
Remedies I made
- The whole idea with using Freelist was that I wasn't going to get sucked into maintaining a mailinglist, I don't have much time for it. I also feel the mailinglist isn't taking off, and that's fine with me. This forum is great (being a web forum) and I can use RSS personally so no big deal. Thus I am handing over administration to Federico Cerrato. I am still admin, and so is Clay and Andreas, but Federico is top gun now.
- I raised the failed delivery limit and also turned off automatic unsubscription. But we have no way of resubscribing people, although we do have the list of people affected. I am going to send out this text as a personal email to those addresses.
To resubscribe just use:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nim-dev
Sorry
Sorry for the mess. I am not convinced forum forwarding is a good idea - but others are and the list is now in the hands of Federico :) I will try to generate a bit of exclusive :) traffic on it though.
regards, Göran