NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Missing mailings.
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Apr 11, 22:10 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Apr 11, 22:10 EDT
George H, you wrote: "Of course there may be others I have missed; if so, I am unlikely to find out." Yep. It's an intermittent bug --the worst kind from a debugging perspective. I don't think Dan Hogan can really do anything about this. The guy who runs webkahuna may not be able to figure it out either. I've managed two Internet lists. Both were years ago, and I'm not claiming any technical expertise here, but I've never seen anything like these strange problems on Navigation-L. And: "I have to admit, somewhat reluctantly, that Frank may be right. It may make sense to jump ship, into the vessel that he has provided; imperfect though those arrangements may be." Well, you'll never know unless you try! www.fer3.com/NavList . By the way, the "vessel" is provided by google.com. Forty-five people have signed up so far. Just under half of the people I sent direct invitations to have joined. About twenty learned of the list indirectly. If anyone reading this did not receive a direct invitation, it was only because I did not spot your e-mail address in recent messages (which was the only method available to me at the time). By the way, Robert Gainer expressed concern about becoming a spam target by signing up for a list through google. This is a serious concern, and I have given it a lot of thought and I've done some web research, too. Short answer: google's masking system makes it very unlikely that automated software will be able to steal web addresses. Google as a corporate entity has no reason whatsoever to sell e-mail addresses since their monetary value is trivial, and the impact on google's reputation from doing so would be severe. The biggest danger to anyone's e-mail address is when it is listed on a web site in an "unmasked" form. When that happens, it will almost inevitably make its way onto a spam list since these are usually generated by sifting through web sites and postings to public lists (Usenet, e.g.) for any strings with the format of an e-mail address. Your best defense against this is to search the net for your address occasionally. Take your complete e-mail address, put it in quotes, and google it. You may be surprised! Give it a try. Of course, anyone can sign up for any mailing list, like Nav-L, and dump all the messages for a few months to simple software that extracts e-mail addresses. It's easy, and you would never know how it occurred. So there's no guarantee that your e-mail address is safe from spam targeting. This hasn't happened to this list (or does not appear to have happened) simply because this is a small group and e-mail addresses have very low monetary value. -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars