st: What reaches Statalist and what doesn't

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

That's not much extra information about your errant posts, although I
can't add much clarification either.

Backing up here: Statalist is run by software called Majordomo plus
some other stuff which I can't tell you about either in principle or
in practice. "Some other stuff" includes e.g. stuff to do with
security in one sense or another and is unlikely, but not impossibly,
to be the issue here.

Ironically, or not, no one that you see named as responsible for
Statalist is an authority on majordomo. We just use it, directly or
indirectly.

The nub of the matter is, as I understand it,

1. Majordomo accepts only emails from addresses registered as
Statalist users. So, what sometimes happens is people register under
one email address but try to send to Statalist from another address.
If you tried to do this, that is an explanation for posts not
appearing, but I'll guess that you used the same address for
everything you sent.

2. What should be filtered out is anything other than plain text or
ASCII posts. That should mean HTML, formatted posts generally,
attachments in any sense, and other such e-junk. Bizarrely, some of
this stuff sometimes gets through and I don't know why. But we've
found that people can be in denial that they are sending formatted
posts, etc. when they are. The good reason for this is that what you
see looks so normal to you that you don't realise that it is really
formatted.

3. Sometimes the other stuff picks up on something fishy about your
post and it gets bounced with an email message explaining why. This
is, at least in my experience, often a misreading of key words
occurring early in your post.

Whatever the details, an important rule of thumb for members is that
the working definition of "what gets through" is "whatever appears in
the archives" and _that_ you should always be able to inspect. But,
conversely, the archives help not a bit with what didn't get through.

Otherwise it should be clear that it's hard for anyone to explain
specifically what was wrong with emails we didn't see. Sorry, but
there it is.

Nick
njcoxstata@gmail.com


On 7 August 2013 16:07, Muhuri, Pradip (SAMHSA/CBHSQ)
<Pradip.Muhuri@samhsa.hhs.gov> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am new to the Statalist.
>
> I still don't understand why my earlier messages except two of them did get posted to the Statalist.  Our IT service desk has confirmed that my all messages have left our domain successfully and that they reached the recipient domain (i.e., Statalist).
>
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