[ydl-gen] Note well for future reference (was: Remove me please)

[Rich Kulawiec]

To those of you sending "unsubscribe" notices to the entire list,
on the off chance that you are marginally educable:

Every responsibly-run mailing list supports a corresponding "-request"
address, which, per RFC 2142 as well as decades of Internet best practice,
will reach the entity (human or computer) which is responsible
for handling list-related requests such as "subscribe" and "unsubscribe".

Thus, if example.com runs a list named "foo", the address

	foo-request at example.com

MUST (per RFC 2142 language) exist and should respond to
subscribe/unsubscribe requests.

This particular bit of knowledge is baseline information which all
subscribers to all mailing lists should have; it is fundamental to
responsible participation in them.  Just as anyone who does not support
this convention is clearly incompetent to run a mailing list, anyone
who does not know this convention is clearly incompetent to participate
in a mailing list.

This list, I'm happy to say, complies with that standard.

Moreover, this list also complies with RFC 2369, which provides a
mechanism to explicitly provide this information in the headers
*of every single message sent to the list*.   If you will take a
moment to peruse those headers, you will find, among other things
(line-split for readability):

	List-Unsubscribe:
        <http://lists.fixstars.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general>,
	<mailto:yellowdog-general-request at lists.fixstars.com?subject=unsubscribe>

If your mail client does not show you this, then it is broken,
and should be repaired or replaced.  (Some particularly clueful
mail clients are capable of parsing RFC 2369 headers and presenting
the information in them via buttons or similar; but even those that
don't should still display this information.)  In this case, we find
that this RFC 2369 header unsurprisingly tells us that sending mail to:

	yellowdog-general-request at lists.fixstars.com

with "Subject":

	unsubscribe

should work.

If it does not work, for whatever reason (perhaps errant mail blocking
of one sort or another?) then it is of course quite rude and selfish
to bother the entire list complaining about that.  The proper way to
report such problems is to address them to the list-owner, e.g.:

	yellowdog-general-owner at lists.fixstars.com

If the list-owner address does not exist or does not respond, then
correspondence should be addressed to the REQUIRED (per RFC 822,
which has been around more than quarter of a century, and its updated
version, RFC 2822) "postmaster" address, e.g.:

	postmaster at lists.fixstars.com

or possibly

	postmaster at fixstars.com

depending on how fixstars.com has elected to set up their mail system.

So to summarize:

	1. Use the -request address
	2. If there's a problem, use the -owner address
	3. If problem remains, use the postmaster address
	4. DO NOT send "unsubscribe" requests to the entire list.  Ever.

I strongly recommend that everyone who plans to join any mailing list
of any kind commit these rudimentary steps to memory.

I also strongly suggest that those of you who sent these inappropriate
messages to the entire list owe the entire list an unconditional public
apology for your rude behavior.  Let us now see if any of you have the
courage and civility to render one.

---Rsk