Warning: Your List Subscription May Be Edited Without Notice

[Koontz John E]

I've just received a diagnostic email message from a user's email service
indicating that a message from the list to them was rejected because it
seemed like spam.  As far as I know, in this case the user didn't receive
any notification at all.  The posting was one of the lists of Omaha-Ponca
nouns by gender, so Net Siouan was at fault.  It also occurs to me that
the technical word for the male sex organ was one of the glosses in that
list. Hmm.  (Make note to resort to euphemisms in the future.)

If I notice any of these rejections I will let the beneficiary know, but
an awful lot of the list-diagnostic mail of this nature I get consists of
either (a) letters indicating that a nonsubscriber was trying to post spam
or viruses to the list (more attempted spam than actual postings these
days) or (b) letters indicating that a subscriber's mailbox is full.

Now, as to these latter messages, they are particularly common with
certain users and certain free mail services.  It is possible to set the
list to automatically unsubscribe users whose mail is bounced as
undeliverable, but so far I've felt that this would undully penalize
subscribers who need to use free email services.  Not to mention I'm not
sure under what conditions the automatic deletion takes affect.  Anybody's
mailbox might be down for a few days from time to time.

The down side of this is that I don't read the diagnostic mailings from
the list server as attentatively as I once did.  So, to make this all more
manageable, I may at some point elect to unsubscribe manually those users
who are particularly consistent about full-mailbox bounces.  The awkward
thing is that I have no way to notify them that they are deleted.  So, if
you fall into this category and you think that the list has been awful
quite recently, you should check the archive at
http://www.linguistlist.org or drop me a line.  I will be happy to
reinstate interested parties with no hard feelings, but I get one
diagnostic message per posting per full mailbox and the cummulative effect
at times is not unlike the Chinese water torture if continued over several
weeks.

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz