Bad language

[Atro Tossavainen]

(cc'd personally in case your unsubscription already happened, sorry if
you get this in duplicate.)

Steve,

> It is entirely possible that the user that you are referring to is me.  I am
> in State College, PA and I work for a company that uses Scan-mail (which I
> have no control over).

Quite likely, but I can't say for sure as the bounce message did not
indicate the user account which would have received the message.
Your domain is the right one, however.

> Having your e-mail blocked doesn't actually bother me at all, as I don't
> necessarily want the e-mail that typically contains language such as this.

That's not a problem to me, of course.  What is not acceptable, however,
is autoresponders responding to any messages received from mailing lists,
for any reason.  This problem is at its greatest during the summertime,
when a single message sent to a large mailing list can provoke dozens if
not hundreds of "I'm on holiday!" reports from people who are on that
list and whose autoresponders aren't smart enough to observe the
"Precedence:" header.  This includes pretty much everything else but the
UNIX program "vacation".  The most notable offenders in this respect are
Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell Groupwise, all of whose
default autoresponse policies are braindead beyond belief.

Would you want to know, in bazillotuplicate, if the entire readership of
this mailing list was on vacation simultaneously?  I know I have better
uses for my inbox.

> In your case, there was a technical basis for the e-mail, but often, this is
> spam advertising pr0n, etc.

If you want to confirm your e-mail address as being live to spammers so
that you can receive more spam in the future, it is a great idea to auto-
respond to spam with such a mechanism.  On the other hand, if you
preferred not to receive any more spam than you currently do, you would
not respond to spammers in any way, either manually or automatically.

> As this is a technical mailing list, I am however surprised that your
> expressions can't be more accurately conveyed using other words.

The expletive was aimed at nVidia's driver policy and the problems it
constantly causes to anybody who doesn't fit in nVidia's world view, in
this case, people using Linux on non-x86 systems.  In my opinion, it was
called for.  I wouldn't have used it in this context just because I
happened to find a four-letter word in a dictionary and I thought it
would make my English seem more authentic.  I know better than that.

> Second, I'm going to unsubscribe from this list as the quality of the
> YellowDog distribution seems to get slower and buggier with each
> release.  Don't get me wrong, I have been a happy user for several
> versions, but with Gentoo, if I don't like something, it's my own fault.

I'm not affiliated with YDL in any way except by being a user, so I
don't mind.

If you had a nVidia graphics card in your Mac laptop, you would have
the same problems with Gentoo as those people who originally posted
about their problems on this list, and you might be tempted to utter
the dreaded four-letter word about nVidia's driver policies, too.

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
< URL : http : / / www . helsinki . fi / %7E atossava / > NO FILE ATTACHMENTS