Subject: Mailing List reminders

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:51:05 +0100

I used to get a reminder once a month of the mailing lists to which I am
subscribed, such as this one, but, around the time of IETF89, this
stopped working.  I see that the option on every one of the lists to
which I am subscribed has been reset to not send a reminder, not
something that I would intentionally ever do

Is this a change of policy, an announcement somewhere that I missed?

I note that the IETF web site page on Email Lists still talks of monthly
reminders without even mentioning that they are optional, which suggests
to me that it is not the policy that has changed.

Tom Petch

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From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 13:16:24 +0200

> something that I would intentionally ever do

I'd be curious to know some more on the usefulness of reminders.
They're what I call a time-distributed database.  When subscribers
need to query the status of their subscription, they simply perform a
time seek --by waiting at most one month-- and voilà!

Since we've been discussing how DMARC is going to affect the fate of
mailing lists, recently on this list, I wonder why 21st century
technology doesn't offer anything better.  The outcome of that
discussion was that mailbox providers don't know the status of their
clients' subscriptions too, hence they cannot deploy any cooperative
solution such as whitelisting, weak signatures, or 3rd party auths.

Ale
-- 
"Never expect the people who caused a problem to solve it."
                                         - Albert Einstein

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From: Miles Fidelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 07:57:43 -0400

> solution such as whitelisting, weak signatures, or 3rd party auths.

Well that's just wrong.  All the mailing lists that I administer send 
all kinds of warnings when addresses bounce, when spam is captured, and 
so forth.  I run sympa, but I expect mailman and other list managers 
provide similar administrative tools.

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra

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From: David Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 07:01:48 -0700 (PDT)

I seem to recall this was changed in response to the fact that the
password is included in clear text.

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From: Paul <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 08:39:25 -0400

Sent from my iPhone

> reminders 

I unfortunately still got one from the ietf mailman on June 1st. But perhaps I was grandfathered in. 

Paul

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 08:16:05 +1200

Tom,

> Is this a change of policy, an announcement somewhere that I missed?

You missed a discussion a few months ago, but the actual change took
place two months ago and afaik was not announced.

If you like your reminders, you need to switch them on again in
the mailman options for any of your subscriptions. There's a button for
making the setting global. Ditto for IRTF lists.

> to me that it is not the policy that has changed.

You could point out that documentation error to <[email-masked]>

   Brian

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From: Alexa Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 14:01:19 -0700

Brian, Tom,

> You could point out that documentation error to <[email-masked]>

My apologies for coming in late to this conversation, and for not noticing that the website text still needed to be updated. We will update it now.

Alexa

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From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 11:24:20 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alessandro Vesely" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2014 12:16 PM

> I'd be curious to know some more on the usefulness of reminders.

They are useful because e-mail is overridingly spam or something else
evil.
Mailing lists have no reliable way of authenticating the From: address.
Therefore mailing lists implement a system to suspend a subscription
when enough inappropriate mail has come with a given From: address.
This happens to me with IETF WG lists (such as, in the past, v6ops).
At the same time, some lists are so quiet, especially now in the
inter-IETF meeting stadia that it is hard to tell whether or not one is
still subscribed. (and I note a number of 'Test' posts to lists which
suggests others have similar concerns).
The monthly reminder enables me to check that I am still subscribed.
Logical.
Tom Petch