[Coral-List] posting tip for coral-list

[Mike Jankulak]

Since this comes up on more or less a weekly basis, I thought I'd post a general reminder for the whole group:  be sure to send your submissions to coral-list from the same email address that you are subscribed with!

It's common these days for people to have multiple email addresses.  Perhaps you have a .gov or a .edu where you work, but you also have a gmail or hotmail or yahoo account as well.  Maybe you even forward all of your addresses to one account so you might not always notice what specific address your email correspondents are using.

But coral-list only knows the exact email address you are subscribed under.  If you try to post to the list and your from-address is different from the address where you receive our list traffic, it won't work.  You won't get a bounce message, the moderators won't get an error message.  Your post will be silently discarded, and you'll be left waiting for your post to appear, wondering what went wrong.

We do this to avoid "backscatter spam."  That's when an evildoer sends us a post that spoofs a real but unsubscribed address, say, jill.q.public at domain.com.  If we sent Jill an error message telling her that she must subscribe before posting, we would effectively be spamming her.  She didn't send us anything, after all, it was an evildoer just pretending to be her.  And the amount of incoming spam from unsubscribed addresses is so very large that even the whole team of moderators couldn't comb through it on a daily basis looking for real posts from people subscribed under different addresses.

Note that you might be bitten by this if your email "from" address is only slightly different.  Maybe you are subscribed as your.name at university.edu, but you can also use your.name at school.university.edu.  Coral-list won't recognize those as the same address.

One final comment -- if you really want to be able to post from multiple addresses, you can.  Simply subscribe to the list under both addresses.  Wait, you say, that will get me two copies of every message!  But not if you disable delivery on one of the two subscriptions.  That way, you can still post from both addresses but you'll only get one copy of list traffic.  You can do this yourself by managing your subscription on the listserver, or send email to coral-list-owner at coral.aoml.noaa.gov if you want the moderators to help out.

cheers,
Mike J+, coral-list mod team


-- 
Mike Jankulak, Systems Administrator, University of Miami / CIMAS
NOAA / Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory
4301 Rickenbacker Causeway, Miami, FL 33149 -- 305-361-4543