Did y'all get my "Is anyone reading this" post?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "SY" == Steve Youngs <steve at youngs.au.com> writes:

    SY> I didn't.  But I unsubscribed to that list ages ago because it
    SY> was 99.9% spam.

Sure.  That's because the posting rate was essentially zero; if one
spam and no real posts get through, that's 100% spam but not an excuse
for unsubscribing, IMO.  I was subscribed throughout, and I suppose I
got maybe 5-10 spams a month.  (Yes, I do have a good idea because I
keep them _all_ until they've been addressed in the filters---xemacs
mail is short-circuited around my personal filters.)

This is an XEmacs process problem, not a spam problem, as far as I'm
concerned.  xemacs-design is just underused.

    SY> I wouldn't be surprised if most people did the same.

Doesn't seem to be the case.  I don't think that list ever went about
350 subscribers that I saw; as Adrian says, it's 304 now.  Of those,
about 40% are no-mail, which I think is a reasonable response to
getting no real posts for months on end.

However, the great majority of those no-mails are addresses I have
_never_ seen before.  Sure, we don't want to turn off the lurkers if
we can avoid it, but the evidence that people who care by and large
stayed subscribed _and_ receiving mail, despite the negligible rate of
posts.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.