Mailing List

By subscribing to our email mailing list, you'll be sent updates regarding our meetings, and you'll be sent messages posted by subscribers. Only subscribers may post messages to our mailing list, and these messages are sent to all subscribers.

We have human gatekeepers who review subscription requests. We won't approve requests that we believe are fraudulent, and if an approved subscriber abuses this service, then their subscription will be revoked without notice.

When submitting your subscription request, you should include a short introductory message to give our gatekeepers a reason to believe that you're not a scammer. It can sometimes take us a few days to review requests, but if you're able to attend our meetings, then we'll prioritize your review.

If we approve your subscription request, then our system will email you a welcome message with details for using our mailing list. If you don't receive our welcome message within seven days, and if it didn't get intercepted by your spam filters, then we might have suspected you of being a scammer, so you could try again, or you could ask about this at our meetings.

Subscribers may unsubscribe at any time. Details for unsubscribing are included in the welcome message that our system sends to all new subscribers, but if you have any problems unsubscribing, please report the problem using the form on this page, or by talking with us at our meetings, and we'll unsubscribe you as soon as we can.

Sender Restrictions

To send messages to our mailing list, you must be a subscriber, and your email service must meet requirements that shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of email users:

• Your SMTP server's "HELO"/"EHLO" FQDN must match the DNS PTR record of your SMTP server's IP address, and the HELO/EHLO FQDN must resolve to the same IP address. This requirement has been enforced for many years by the Internet's most popular email service providers, and it's quite effective at reducing the amount of spam that mail servers have to process.
• Each IP address of each SMTP server must have only one DNS PTR record. For almost all SMTP servers, this is normal and expected, but there are extremely rare cases where SMTP servers have IP addresses with multiple DNS PTR records, and this usually causes problems for users of these SMTP servers.

Here's a procedure to test the compatibility of your email service:

1. Go here: https://www.mail-tester.com/
2. Send a test email message to the randomly generated email address shown on the page.
3. Click/Tap the "Then check your score" button.
4. Read the results of the "authenticated" tests.

If the test results show that "You're properly authenticated", then your email service should be able to send messages to our mailing list. If not, then you should report this problem to your email service provider, or if you're providing your own email services, then you might want to read a book like "Run Your Own Mail Server" by Michael W Lucas.

When an email server that doesn't meet these requirements tries to send email to ours, its IP address will be blocked automatically. We can manually unblock an IP address, but if we're really busy like we usually are, then you might have to wait a few days for us to review your request.

Technical restrictions aside, we ask everybody to follow IETF's "Netiquette Guidelines" (RFC 1855). This document was published in 1995, but it's still relevant.

Our mailing list server will probably include additional restrictions in the future. We intend to warn subscribers about such changes before they take effect, and we intend to post the details on this page.

Subscription Form

Submissions made using this form are sent to our mailing list's gatekeepers only. Our gatekeepers read all submissions, but it can sometimes take a few days to process requests, and we won't reply to messages that we believe are fraudulent.