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To get on the mail list, send email with a Subject: of "subscribe" to
lute-request@cs.dartmouth.edu and your name will be added to the list. you will get
a message in reply that tells you important information about the list, like
how to get off. *Keep this message!*
-technical note - you can also put the word "subscribe", "signon", "signup"
"add me" or "sign me up" in the subject line.
If you are sending mail as "plain text" you can also put these words in the
first three lines of your message.
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To get off the mail list, send email with a Subject: of "unsubscribe" to
lute-request@cs.dartmouth.edu and your name will be taken off the list. you will get
a message in reply.
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The lists that you can join are:
| list subject | subscription address |
| (Renaissance) Lute | lute-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
| Baroque Lute | baroque-lute-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
| Medieval Lute | medieval-lute-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
| Lute Builders | lute-builder-request |
| Northumbrian Smallpipes | nsp-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
Baroque Dance
(Feuillet) | feuillet-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
| Vihuela and Baroque Guitar | vihuela-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
| Cittern | cittern-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
| Early Romantic Guitar | early-guitar-request@cs.dartmouth.edu |
Simply follow the intructions above, but substitute the "address" for
lute-request@cs.dartmouth.edu. Use the same address to
unsubscribe.
By the way, to post a message, remove the -request part of the address.
You must be a list member to post messages.
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You may get a message that looks like THIS
when you try and get off the mail list. This usually happens for one
of two reasons:
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You are impatient, and you sent in three requests to get off the list.
The first one succeeded, and when the other two requests got to the robot,
your name wasn't on the list anymore.
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Your name changed since you first signed up. Say you signed up as "joe-lute@aol.com"
and you changed your handle to "big-joe-lute@aol.com" - the unsubscribing robot
thinks that joe-lute and big-joe-lute are different people. Or say your ISP changed
from foo.net to bar.net but arranged everything so that mail addressed to your
old address still gets to you. Or you renamed your computer from bilbo.work.com
to frodo.work.com but the mail is still forwarded. The unsubscriber robot
would get confused.
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If lute mail to you bounces I take your name off the list, and
you don't get lute mail anymore. This can happen for many reasons, but when it happens
I figure that I can't send you email to find out why you aren't getting email,
so I take your name off the list.
Sometimes the error messages I get are clear, and say that your account is no
longer open. Sometimes things aren't so clear. If your mailbox is full I can't
tell whether you have abandoned that mail account forever, or whether you
are just away for a day and will clear it out soon. So I take your name off the list,
trusting that you will put your name back on the list if you want to
continue to get lute mail.
Recently Yahoo has blocked or delayed all mail from my server. If that happens I
may take all Yahoo! users off my lists, and leave it to you to subscribe
again. Perhaps gmail is a better choice.
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The messages to the list are archived on the web at
http://www.mail-archive.com/lute%40cs.dartmouth.edu/.
This archive has a useful search feature.
The
baroque lute and
vihuela
and
cittern and
nsp
list messages are also archived at this site.
The lute list is also available at the
openSubscriber web site. openSubscriber seems to be more relaxed
about filtering out postings.
So is the
baroque-lute list,
the
medieval-lute list,
the
cittern list,
the
vihuela list,
and the
nsp list.
Note that if you read messages from the web, and your name isn't
on the mail list, you will not be able to post messages to the list.
The mail-archive site has very aggressivev spam filters which remove some
postings. It especially seems to remove postings which refer to
other web sites or have web sites in the signature. As of Dec 2007 opensubscriber
actually seems to have more posts missing. I have no connection with either
mail-archive.com or openSubscriber.com and I can not change how they select
what to post and what to not post. I simply forward mail to their
site and they process it according to their own rules.
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Archives of all the messages are kept at
ftp://ftp.cs.dartmouth.edu/pub/lute
in archive files which have been compressed with gzip.
See http://www.gzip.org/
Most browsers can uncompress the files and display them.
The archives are generally seperated into several parts for each year.
I have noticed as of June 05 that the Mac Tiger OS can no longer
see the archive files, for some reason.
The nsp list archive is at
ftp://ftp.cs.dartmouth.edu/pub/nsp
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The lute mail robot removes all enclosures, good and bad, from mail.
You can't get a virus, and you can't get (or send) a picture or mp3 recording
either. Occasionally an enclosure will not be removed correctly and
you will see a large block of random characters, but your computer won't be
able to unpack the virus, so it won't hurt your computer.
However, modern viruses have a trick of forging the sender address, so
you may get mail that *looks* like it came from the lute list.
You can read about forged headers here.
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There are two issues here.... First, the lute list is unmoderated. That means that
I don't read and approve mail before it gets sent out to people, rather, the messages
get sent out as soon as they get to the mail list robot. If I had to approve
each message it could take a week for the message to go out, and this would spoil
the immediacy of the conversations. Also, I am not a lute scholar, and if I moderated the mail
people would expect me to confirm the validity of the opinions expressed in
messages, and I am not qualified to do that.
The second issue is that I believe in an open exchange of ideas, and
I rely on you, the reader, to ignore any messages posted by people
that bother you. You don't have to read each message, and you may
soon find that you don't want to read certain people's messages.
However (AOL users!) if you decide to tell your mail reader to reject
certain messages, be sure that the reader doesn't send a rejection
notice back to the lute mail robot. Otherwise we might think that
mail to you is bouncing and remove your name from the list!
I do have the ability to completely ban someone from the list but
I do this very rarely.
My suggestion is one your mother might have made...if you ignore them
they will go away. I think flame wars are driven by everyone's
desire to get the last word.
Update 2005
I have in fact now banned Matanya and two other people from the lute mail
list because their presence causes an unpleasant level of
hostility on the list, and because they have used the lute list
as a vehicle for personal attacks.
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- It could take several hours for you to get the message back.
If the robot tries to send you a message and your computer is too busy
to accept it, the robot waits a whole hour before trying again.
- The message must be addressed to lute@cs (or another list address.)
Some messages sent by some mailers, especially replies, don't have the
lute name in them, and the robot gets confused.
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If your message has the words :
subscri signon signup "sign me up" "sign on" "add me" suscribe "sub lute"
unsub signoff un-subscr "remove me" unsuscribe unscribe
in the first 4 lines or the subject, the robot will think that you are
trying to get on or off the lute list and will send you a message asking you
to send your request to the lute-request address instead.
This is because mail lists are plagued with these requests, which
are sent to the wrong address.
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To post to the list, you must be on the list. Sometimes people who get
lute mail at home post from their work address, and the message is
put on hold. Sometimes people change their handles - like changing
from jblow@foo.com to Joseph.Blow@foo.com. This confuses the mail
robot. And some people read messages on the web and aren't actually
on the list, so their messages are held. I check for held messages
and forward them on when I get to it. Sometimes that is several
days later.
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As you may notice, I try and keep spam off of the
lute list, and I feel that I have been mostly
successful. I know you people can only see the
spam that gets through the filters, but believe me, there
is a lot of bad mail that doesn't get on to the
lute list!
One of the filters I use is called "
spamcop" and it
works by listing computers that it thinks have sent
a lot of spam recently. I use spamcop because if
a lute list member's computer uses spamcop and spam goes
through the lute list, Dartmouth College will be listed
as a spam producing computer, and mail from Dartmouth to
some sites will fail. This is not good.
Many people send spam from one of AOL's many computers,
and so some AOL computers get listed by spamcop. So if you
send messages from AOL there is a possibility that
the AOL server that you use is blacklisted and you won't
be able to send mail to the Lute list. You won't be notified,
your mail will simply not appear on the Lute mail list.
If that happens to you you can try to re-send the message
in a day or two when your AOL server is no longer blacklisted,
or you can choose a different service for your email. I am
sorry for the trouble it causes, but my primary duty is to
assure that Dartmouth College does not have mail problems.
- I also block messages the have certain obscenities, as well
as phrases commonly used by people who send out spam (unsolicited
junk email.)
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To get rid of those funny character codes you have to
eliminate "quoted-printable" from your messages. Usually
there is a place to choose how the message is formatted -
plain-text, html, rtf, etc, and a place to choose how the
letters are encoded - plain-text, base64, or quoted-printable.
The latter may be under an "advanced" button somewhere.
Plain-text works more smoothly with the
lute list then quoted-printable. Base64 may work, but sometimes
it appears as a solid block of random letters.
I have seen cases where a message has been messed up because
an Anti-Virus checker has reformatted the message!
for more info see quoted-printable.html
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The mail robot checks each message to see if the sender is a member of
the list. If you are not a member you can not post a message to
the list. If you change your handle somehow, for example changing
from jdoe to john.doe, the mail list server will not recognise
the new address,
and you will have to resubscribe.