General introduction to RISCOSitory mailing lists
RISCOSitory mailing lists, like the website itself, are run by Vince M Hudd as a side project of Soft Rock Software, and are subject to a number of rules that subscribers are expected to accept and adhere to, as well as general guidelines and principals that are in some cases fundamental to how they work.
What follows, therefore, are a combination of instructions, rules, and guidelines as to how to use these lists, followed by a number of frequently asked questions (FAQs) – some of these are based on actual questions (or rather problems) that have come my way from time to time, and others are simply preemptively considered.
Instructions on using the lists
Subscribing to a mailing list
There are two main ways to subscribe to a list. One is to do so via email, and the other is to do so via the web interface:
- To subscribe by email: Send an email to name-of-list-request@riscository.co.uk, from the email address you wish to use for the list, with the word ‘subscribe’ as the subject line. You should then receive an email containing a link on which you need to click to complete (confirm) the subscription. Once the subscription process has been completed, you should receive an email containing a password, which you may wish to use in future to administer your subscription.
- To subscribe via the web: Visit the page for the mailing list itself if you have it, otherwise visit the RISCOSitory mailing lists page, find the list there, and click through to its page. A little way down the page, you’ll see a section entitled ‘Subscribing to name-of-list‘ with a short form to fill in – enter the email address at which you wish to subscribe, optionally your name, and you can choose a password in case you wish to log in to administer your subscription in future (but if you don’t choose a password, the list server will send you one as part of the process). After doing this you will receive an email containing a link to confirm your subscription – click on the link to do so.
NOTE: DO NOT RE-USE A PASSWORD THAT YOU ARE ALSO USING ELSEWHERE.
If the list is one that requires approved membership – for example, the person or organisation who requested the list be set up in the first place may have stipulated that they want list membership limited to registered users of their commercial software – your membership may be delayed until they finally approve it.
Once subscribed, you should then receive any messages sent by other subscribers to the mailing list.
Unsubscribing from a mailing list
The easiest way to unsubscribe is to do so via email, although it can in most cases also be done using the web interface.
- To unsubscribe by email: Send an email from your subscribed address to name-of-list-request@riscository.co.uk, with the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject line. You may then receive an email containing a link to confirm that you wish to unsubscribe, which you will need to visit.
- To unsubscribe via the web: Visit the page for the mailing list itself if you have it, otherwise visit the RISCOSitory mailing lists page, find the list there, and click through to its page. A little way down the page, you’ll see a section entitled ‘name-of-list Subscribers’ which contains two parts. The first is for list administrators to visit and check the list of subscribers – you can ignore that – and the second part is the one to unsubscribe (or edit your list options). Enter the address at which you’ve subscribed to the list here, and click the button next to it. You should then be taken to a second page, into which you can enter your password either to log in (click the first button) or unsubscribe (click the second button). The password is required to avoid people deliberately unsubscribing others. If you don’t remember your password, there is also a third button for you to receive it by email.
Sending emails to a mailing list
First and foremost, with some administrative exceptions (for example me, as the person who pays the bills), in order to post to a RISCOSitory mailing list, you must be subscribed to it – and your message to the list must come from the same email address at which you have subscribed to it.
With that in mind, to post to the list, simply send your message to name-of-list@riscository.co.uk – subject to it adhering to some of the rules I have put in place, outlined below, the message should then reach the list and be sent out to other subscribers. That message will also appear in the associated list archive.
Accessing the list archive
Each list is generally set up so that messages to it are archived, with that archive being accessible via the web. To view the archive and find messages held in it, visit the RISCOSitory mailing lists page, find the list there, and click through to its page. The first section on the page provides a link to the list’s archive, the address for which will take the form https://riscository.co.uk/pipermail/name-of-list_riscository.co.uk/
At one point, all of the list archives required a log-in, using the subscriber email and password (see above under subscribing). However, this requirement has now been removed in most cases, so you should be able to click through to the archives.
Options available to subscribers by logging in to a list
As well as being able to unsubscribe via the list interface, you can also log in and make some basic choices about your subscription – such as to remain subscribed, but disable receipt of emails, or to change the email address at which you are subscribed without going through the steps of unsubscribing from one address, and subscribing again at the new one.
To do either of these things and more, follow the instructions above about unsubscribing – but instead of clicking the ‘Unsubscribe’ button, click the ‘Log in’ one.
The options available to you once you are logged in are in two sections. The first are those options where you may need to provide (new) information:
- Change your subscribed email address and/or name: Simply enter the new details in the relevant boxes (twice in the case of a change of email address) and click the button labelled ‘Change My Address and Name’. Note that there is a ‘Change globally’ option box immediately below the button to make this change – if that is ticked, the email address/name change should apply to all RISCOSitory mailing lists to which you are subscribed (with the same email address) in one go.
- Unsubscribe from the list: This allows you to unsubscribe after you’ve logged in – with a tick box to confirm you really want to do that – rather than by clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ on the previous page.
- Find out what other RISCOSitory mailing lists you are subscribed to: Simply click the button marked ‘List my other subscriptions’ to see what else you have subscribed to. Note that this is based on your email address – so if you’ve used different addresses for different lists, they won’t show up.
- Find out what your password is: This might seems slightly illogical, given that you should have used your password to log in (perhaps you have your web browser set to remember it, but don’t know how to access the browser’s record of such information), clicking the ‘Email My Password To Me’ button will cause it to be sent to you by email.
- Change your password: You have the option here of changing your password – if you didn’t choose one yourself and are relying on the one chosen for you by the mailing list software, you can change it here to something you feel is more suitable. Input the new password twice, and click ‘Change My Password’ – and again, there is a ‘Change globally’ tick box that should see the change made to all your RISCOSitory mailing list subscriptions in one go.
NOTE: DO NOT RE-USE A PASSWORD THAT YOU ARE ALSO USING ELSEWHERE.
The second section covers options that are handled simply by ticking a box or two:
- Enable or disable mail delivery: This option allows you to remain subscribed to the mailing list, but stops you from receiving emails until you log in again to change the setting back. Simply tick the ‘Enabled’ or ‘Disabled’ option to make this change as necessary – and note that there is also a ‘Set globally’ option, so you can change the setting on all your RISCOSitory mailing lists (at the same subscribed address) in one go. This is useful to turn off delivery of list emails while away on holiday, for example.
- Turn off delivery of your own messages to yourself: Some people take the view that they have a copy of any messages they’ve sent in their own ‘sent mail’ folder, so don’t need to receive a copy from the list server – while others see that delivery as a way to confirm their message made it through. You can change this to your preference here.
- Have the list server acknowledge your messages: An alternative way of knowing if your messages have made it through would be to receive an acknowledgement – you can choose this option here.
- Get a monthly password reminder: This option should enable a monthly message to be sent to you reminding you of your password (with a ‘Set globally’ option to enable it for all lists). However, this function is currently disabled – the option has no effect.
- Conceal yourself from the subscriber list: Setting this option means your email address can be hidden from the list of subscribers when other members view it. However, the lists are generally set so that subscribers can’t view the membership list, only administrators.
- Topic filtering: The next options relate to topic filtering, but this is not enabled – you can’t define topics to which you wish to subscribe, so the option to apply topic filtering has no effect.
- Avoid duplicate messages: Sometimes, people will reply to a list message and copy their reply to the original poster (or another subscriber). This option (if set to ‘Yes’) looks out for when that happens, and if the message has been sent both to the list and to your subscribed address, the list server won’t bother to send a copy to you. And once again, there is a ‘Set globally’ option to apply it to all the RISCOSitory mailing lists to which you have subscribed with the same email address.
At the very bottom of the page, once you have entered any changed information, or changed the options as necessary, there is a ‘Submit My Changes’ button – click that to apply your new choices.
Rules and guidelines for using the lists
If you wish to use the lists, you can easily do so silently by simply subscribing and not posting – also known as lurking. Just subscribe, and let the messages come to you. However, if you wish to post to the list, there are some rules and guidelines that you are expected to adhere to.
Firstly, there is the golden rule: RISCOSitory mailing lists are run by me, Vince Hudd, as part of the services provided by Soft Rock Software to the RISC OS community. I expect subscribers to any lists to be polite and courteous in any messages sent to the lists, and when sending messages to me about any of the lists, or when requiring support.
Remember that while the service is operated for free to you, members of that community, it is not done without a cost to me. The domain and lists are hosted separately to my main hosting package, and therefore incur an additional cost, over and above my main hosting fees, so it is purely at my discretion that these lists are run, and whether any given individual is permitted to use them. I have done and will again bar people from using this facility if I see fit.
With ever increasing hosting fees, I have to review my position and whether I can continue to justify the existence of this facility on an annual basis. It’s best not to put me in a position where I feel that the amount of problems it causes outweighs the worth of providing the service – which certain people have come close to doing in the past. It’s a shame that I have to make this point, but sadly, experience tells me it is necessary to do so.
With that said, the main rules are as follows:
- Use the correct email address. This should be obvious given the instructions outlined above, but you must post to the list from the same email address at which you subscribed. If you do not, your message will not go through to the list, and you’ll receive an email notifying you of that fact. A similar email will also go to the list administrator (me) and moderator (me, and sometimes others, depending on the list) – but please don’t expect us to approve the message and let it through, as we are usually giving up our valuable time for free. Better is to post from the right address from the outset.
Related to this, if you attempt to post to a list and receive such a message, please double check that you are using the correct email address before contacting me or any list administrator for support, for the same reason. - Keep your message short and to the point. It’s sensible to trim messages as much as possible – don’t reply to the entire previous message (or even message chain) with everything quoted in full. It’s unnecessary, and makes messages larger and larger. Just quote what is necessary to provide context for your message, and reply to that.
Related to this, please try not to ‘top post’ – that is to put your own reply above the message you are replying to. When people reply that way, it is common for the previous messages to be quoted in full, which in turn leads to the problem of excessively sized messages. - Attached files are forbidden. Do not attach anything to your messages, such as zip files or photographs. The list has been set up so that these are removed, which means doing so won’t work anyway, but if you do, and refer to the attachment in your message, it probably won’t make sense to its readers.
Related to this, if you do attach something and realise that it’s missing when your message is sent out to subscribers, don’t contact me or anyone else involved in running the list to ask why, or to make an exception and allow it in your case. Put the item you want to attach on a web server somewhere, and provide a link to it in your message to the list. - Do not post your messages in HTML or any kind of rich text format. In practice, doing so makes your message longer than it needs to be, because of the extra formatting that surrounds and is embedded within it – and most well configured software will duplicate your message as plain text anyway. Just stick to plain text.
It’s worth noting that when you use HTML format emails, this comes through as an attachment that will be stripped by the server before sending out your message – so HTML format emails simply do not work. If the message is HTML only (no plain text part) the server will attempt to clean up the HTML and turn it into plain text. Related to this and a number of points above… - There is a size limit applied to messages to the list. Messages above a certain size – which may vary from one list to another – will simply be rejected as being too large. The rejection will take the form of an email to you informing you that your message was too large, as well as messages to the list administrator (me) and moderator (me, and sometimes others, depending on the list) – but please don’t expect us to approve the message and let it through, as we are usually giving up our valuable time for free. It’s better to keep it brief, to the point, and in conformance with these rules to begin with.
A fun fact to bear in mind here is that of the many messages I’ve seen rejected due to the size limit, a notable number were HTML formatted emails where, once the HTML has been stripped, the resulting messages were well within the limit. However the server applies the size check first, so rejects them, rather than stripping the HTML first, then checking the size. The best way to avoid this is to use plain text. - Do send messages both to the list and others. The system has been set up to look out for cases where messages are sent both to the list, and to other email addresses – often by putting multiple addresses in the ‘To’ line, or adding messages to the ‘CC’ line. Where it spots too many (the exact number of which may vary from one list to another), it rejects the messages – again, sending a message back to the sender, and one to the administrator and any moderators in case they wish to approve it. If you wish to avoid this, try to limit your replies either to the list only, or to any third parties only – not to both.
If you feel strongly that you need to send your message to the list and someone else, you can do so by sending the message to the list separately, or by using the ‘BCC’ option in your email client for the third parties, so that the list server isn’t aware.
Frequently asked questions
Some of these are based on issues that have come up over the many years I have been providing the RISCOSitory mailing lists, and some are an attempt at preempting questions that could come up.
Why did my message get rejected?
There are a number of reasons this may have happened, which are outlined in the guidelines and instructions above. For example, check if you’ve sent your message to the list using the correct email address, or that it’s not too large. You should have received a rejection email that explains the problem.
I want to log-in to make some changes to my list subscription settings, but my log-in doesn’t work. Why?
Firstly, check to ensure you are using the right email address and password (see above), but if your email address ends in .com, there is a problem logging in – in that case, it’s best to contact me with details of what you want to do. Please bear in mind that I can be very busy, so may not get around to dealing with your issue immediately, but I’ll usually do so as soon as possible. If nothing’s happened after a couple of weeks, it’s worth contacting me again in case I’ve not seen your email (two possible reasons are that my spam filtering can be very aggressive, and I do get a lot of email, so it’s easy to miss one occasionally.)
Can I post to the list from the archive?
And can I send emails to subscribers from the archive?
Yes. No. Sort of. The archive is not intended to be used that way, and you are strongly advised against doing so – though it is possible. The list’s archive is, as its name suggests, an archive or repository of messages sent to the list, intended as a way to access old messages, perhaps long after a particular subject has been discussed, for example to remind yourself how to perform a particular task in the software the list exists in support of, rather than ask the same question again. To ensure the messages have some degree of context, some information is provided with them – such as who the message was originally sent by. However, the email address is munged (disguised, albeit in a limited way) by the server, and the associated ‘mailto:’ link is set to the address of the list itself.
Clicking on the person who sent the message will therefore result in a message set up in your email client that will, by default, be sent to the list. This is an attempt at preventing spam emails being sent to subscribers by systems that look for and lift email addresses from web pages, so to send your email directly to that person you will need to manually edit the address.
Can spammers send messages to the list?
Unfortunately, yes. Spam is often sent with falsified ‘from’ lines, and these are often a random address listed from those the spamming system will be sending the message to – and sometimes, that will just happen to be an address subscribed to a mailing list, with the list address also on the list of addresses used by the spammer. The list has some degree of spam filtering in place that should hopefully prevent such messages getting through, but a spam message has successfully hit the list, and therefore subscribers, at least once. It is thankfully rare, though – and should become rarer as more and more email systems adopt new measures to verify that senders of email are who they claim to be.
How many RISCOSitory mailing lists are there?
To see all the lists and how many there are, simply visit the RISCOSitory mailing lists page.
How many RISCOSitory mailing lists can you provide?
The original number I was able to provide was ten, but some years ago I upgraded the hosting package so that I could provide up to twenty. This means there is scope for more lists, should people request them, and I feel the subject matter worthy of having a RISCOSitory list.
Not all of the existing lists are used – some have never seen any posts, and some have just fallen into disuse by the original subscribers. If at any point I get close to the limit, I may opt to close old/unused lists to make room without having to increase the costs of running the system.
You mentioned costs above – is there any way to support you with those costs?
Buy stuff from Soft Rock Software. There are only limited options to do so online at this time, but you can certainly spend money at the Soft Rock Software stand at RISC OS shows.
And buying Soft Rock Software’s products at shows means attending those shows – so that helps support that side of the RISC OS community. Win/win, I’d say! 🙂