First, a bit of history....
In the beginning there was popclient. It was simple. It was rough in
places. But for many people, it was good. (For easily understanding
it in order to patch its shortcomings, if nothing else.)
Then ESR patched it beyond recognition, renamed it to fetchmail (for
it now went beyond POP), and decided (as has now been well-documented)
to make it his experimental project.
And so he created fetchmail-friends, an open mailing list filled with
people who used and/or developed and/or asked about fetchmail.
Everyone who breathed "fetchmail" in a message to ESR was added to the
list.
Traffic on the list was generally people asking usage questions and
getting fairly rapid replies from somebody, or people posting bug
reports or patches and getting fairly rapid replies from somebody.
As usage of fetchmail grew, the mailing list grew, both in subscribers
and in volume of mail. Many asked how to get off the list just
because they didn't care about hearing the intricate details of
fetchmail development.
Simultaneously, the practice of spamming grew. fetchmail-friends had
to deal both with spam itself and questions about how to make
fetchmail filter it out.
Eventually the spam on the list got so bad that people began
complaining about it on the list, loudly. Some important contributors
quit the list to avoid the spam. Around this time, we were told that
the list (along with the fetchmail project) would be moved to
SourceForge RSN, and the filtering there would solve the spam problem.
Eventually the list did change, but unless I missed something it did
not move to sourceforge. I wasn't paying too much attention at the
time of the transition, but as far as I can tell, the back-end
software changed and the list became moderated at the same time.
With the list moderated, submitted messages did not get sent out
immediately. Submitters get an immediate response saying the message
is in the moderator's queue, and subscribers get a pile of messages
whenever the moderator (presumably ESR) gets a chance to go through
the queue and approve the messages.
The advantage of this, of course, is that the moderator can delete the
spam before it gets sent to all the subscribers.
There are disadvantages, however. Because of the delay before the
moderator approves posts, people don't get a quick response to their
message (and if they're on the list, they don't receive it back
immediately) and they start to think the list is dead (then they
sometimes post another message to that effect).
There is a more subtle and important disadvantage. When a person
familiar with fetchmail gets one fetchmail message at a time, spread
out over time, he might feel inclined to reply to some of them as they
come in, if he has a few minutes to spare. But when a pile of
fetchmail messages comes in all at once, he's likely to be much more
selective about which ones he responds to. (Here's where I skip the
analysis of that behavior for now, hoping the reader accepts my
description as truth, and not feeling like digging too deep into my
own psyche at 4am.)
So the user sending a question gets worse "service" in two ways --
first by not even getting their question to the right people in a
timely fashion, then by getting their question lumped in with lots of
others so that with a volunteer "staff" their question is less likely
to get answered at all. Some send their question again in hopes of
getting more attention, while others give up and go check out fetchpop
(which apparently is somewhat like popclient was way back in the
beginning) -- or they go back to Outlook.
As one who generally isn't asking the qustions, I could generally live
with this scenario, since although it's worse for the user asking
questions, it is better for me as a list member since I don't get the
spam I used to.
(*Hey*, wake up! Now I'm finally getting to the point....)
But lately, along with the periodic clump of fetchmail messages, I've
been finding... SPAM! I believe the latest batch had three pieces of
spam out of nine total messages, or something like that. Apparently
our moderator is no longer paying much attention to what he is
approving, so we now get the worst of both worlds -- bad for the
users sending questions to fetchmail-friends, and bad for the people
receiving fetchmail-friends mail.
Can we get back to one of the previous states, or find some way to get
the best of all worlds?
--
==============================| "A slice of life isn't the whole cake
Rob Funk <rfunk(_at_)funknet(_dot_)net> | One tooth will never make a full
grin"
http://www.funknet.net/rfunk | -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"