Administrivia: Good mailing list social graces.

From: Daniel Hanson (dhanson_at_securityfocus.com)
Date: 03/17/05

  • Next message: Harlan Carvey: "Re: strange software > winsupdater.exe" 
    Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:06:55 -0700 (MST)
To: incidents@securityfocus.com

    I've posted some guidelines like this before, apparently I have to do it
    again.

    Leaving auto-responders on mailing list messages is not good social
    behaviour. One or two auto-responses may not seem to be a huge problem,
    but when a contributor to the list receives a mass of auto-response
    messages, it dissuades the person from posting in the future.

    We have over 10,000 subscribers, if 1% of them have auto-responders, that
    is 100 messages, Do you like receiving 100 unsolicited messages in a 10
    minute period in the middle of your work day?

    Perhaps someone seeking assistance or advice won't be dissuaded by this
    flood of email, but the people who reply and try to help (we have some
    frequent contributors that do this an awful lot, thank you to all of you),
    are a lot less motivated to put up with this.

    Yet again, someone forwarded me an auto-reply that resulted because some
    lazy site administrator decided to send all security mailing list traffic
    to a a customer care email address that auto-replies to EVERY POST ALL THE
    TIME.

    As I have done before, and will continue to do, I will unsubscribe
    addresses that do this. People on this list should be interested in making
    the Internet a safer and more useable place, auto-replies because you are
    too lazy to turn them off for mailing lists is not the way to do this.

    As an aside, for all you corporate security administrators who seem to use
    your vacation messages when you go away to conferences... If I were
    interested to find the lazy administrators, and target the most lucrative
    companies. I would pick a conference like blackhat or CanSecWest, send an
    email to the list, and see who's away at the conference, and who
    "concerns" should be addressed to while that person is away.

    D

  • Next message: Harlan Carvey: "Re: strange software > winsupdater.exe"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: [OT] Re: David S Wiener is out of the office.
      ... For what it's worth, I only saw it the once, here. ... Auto-responders ... shouldn't send those messages to mailing lists, at all, really. ... (no offense David) ...
      (Fedora)
    • Re: [OT] Re: David S Wiener is out of the office.
      ... the courtesy to prevent it from being repeatedly sent to public ... For what it's worth, I only saw it the once, here. ... Auto-responders ... shouldn't send those messages to mailing lists, at all, really. ...
      (Fedora)