Spam on AUUG mailing lists (was: [Talk] Commercial: Unix/Linux Hands-on Training)

[Enno Davids]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 01:12:46PM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
|
|Talk subscribers: in the past, we used to send messages of this nature
|to auug-announce.  That's arguably worse than sending it to talk,
|since everybody gets it then.  We've had a few complaints, and we're
|thinking of creating a separate list for this kind of announcement.
|Does anybody have views on this?

We had similar complaints from the Vic membership years ago and that was
just around our meeting announcements. There's a fine balance between timely
announcements of interest and irritating people. 

My personal views: (in no particular order...)

	- an open to anything talk list is good. It may attract some spam.
	  Thats the cost of talking.

	- people are likely less precious now than they used to be about
	  both the amount of and nature of email they receive.

	- special purpose lists are good if you can get people on and off
	  them in an easy manner. (i.e. we created a special meetings
	  announcments list but it was never clear that people were
	  subscribing to the right ones for the right messages. In time even
	  the committee became confused about which list was for what use...
	  so we dropped back to a single list.) I'm not convinced the current
	  AUUG model is the ultimate answer here either BTW...

	- its good to find the right level of mailings. These days almost
	  everyone has filtering, either personally or in a larger site wide
	  manner. If you become too loud, too frequent or too irrelevant I
	  suspect you simply end up on their blacklists.

	- like Greg I encourage vendors to engage with groups like AUUG
	  properly. Just sending mail to open mailing lists isn't the way
	  to win hearts and minds, and if you're really trying to sell
	  surely that's the name of the game.

	  (Having said that, by her subsequent actions & statements its clear
	  that Nina isn't one of those I would class as part of the spam
	  problem. People with real return addresses who apologise seldom are.
	  Kudos.)


Enno.
(speaking for himself not AUUG-Vic)