The SIG has now restored both membership lists to the contents of the last backup on October 15. We also manually removed people from the discussion list, who emailed us unsubscribe requests after October 15.

Mailing list tips and how to’s:
The following tips and how to’s are also available on our site (http://www.stc-techedit.org/Discussion+list):

  • Approximately 500 people on average are in this list. When you post to the list, remember that you are speaking to a large audience. Your posting is also saved in the mailman archives and posted to a web page, so be judicious with your words.
  • Use the digest mode to receive a compilation of daily emails to the list.
  • Unsubscribe by sending an email to stctesig-l-leave at mailman.stc.org or by using this web page: http://mailman.stc.org/mailman/listinfo/stctesig-l.
  • Use a personal email address, instead of a work email address. When you change jobs, you do not have to update your subscription.
  • Follow the etiquette for posting to mailing lists (general guidelines from IETF: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855).


Steps taken to mitigate issue:

  • Unsubscribe instructions are now appended to both individual and digest messages from the list.
  • Digest mode is the default for new subscriptions to minimize the impact of mass mailings. Members can change this setting to individual emails, if they so choose. Each existing participant's settings were restored from the backup.
  • Subscribers will now receive a monthly password reminder.
  • Tips, FAQs, and posting etiquette for discussion lists are in the footer of messages and placed more prominently on the discussion list web page.
  • Additional checkpoints have been inserted into the list administrator procedures.
  • We’ve also shared these steps with Society.


Why were emails still coming through a few days later?
The list was closed to new postings on Monday, October 19 at 1:48pm Central. Yet, some people received additional emails after that time.

Some email providers stage delivery of emails over a period of time. Yahoo is an example of this. As of October 20, Yahoo accounts were still receiving the original slew of emails that were sent before mid-day October 19.

Some of the responders to the email, did reply all's several times and included whoever had replied beforehand. So if a person had replied, he got replies directly to his email address from other people who replied to his email.

Also, some people are not checking their email until the end of the day, where the person turned on their email and began to download the original slew of emails. Those emails were originated on or before we shut off the list Monday about 1:48pm CT.

Unfortunately, we cannot control the actions of outside persons and their behavior with email. An individual can set an auto Reply All set in his email, so that anyone who has been caught up in this loop and sends him email will receive an automatic reply from him.

In cases such as this, an abuse notice can be sent to that individual’s provider via their website. You may wish to do that as well.

A suggestion: You can blacklist this person (and anyone else you may be receiving emails directly from) in your email. You may need to contact your IT support person to do that, those directions are different depending upon your email client. Additionally, you may want to contact your IT department to blacklist individual’s emails (or others who are continuing to harass or send unwanted mail) at the server level. They will know what to do and can treat these email addresses as unwanted spam so you do not see them.