[exim] Purpose of exim-users

Folks,

This mailing-list is for mutual support discussion and help by the
users of Exim. It is not a list for advocacy of mail policy,
spam-fighting approaches, RFC holy wars or other mail-related topics
that may come up from time to time.

If you disagree with a request or stance, then you have a number of
options. One is to just remain silent; eg, when if you see a request
which looks too much like a spammer asking for help spamming, you
might choose to just keep silent.

Another is to provide polite opinion interspersed with an answer,
where you help someone get a solution to their problems, even if
perhaps not quite the requested solution. But there's no need to
hammer home the point, once made. We're probably all adults here,
able to make our informed choices, and treating others as ignorant
children will just inflame passions, rather than convince another
adult.

You might suggest, once (politely, as part of an answer that has more
than just "don't do that" to it), a better way to do something, but
continuing to do so becomes telling other people how to run *their*
mail-systems. The Internet's email functions as a group of autonomous
systems, run by local policy for local users, exchanging messages
between those autonomous groups on a rough consensus of how this should
be done, semi-documented in RFCs.

Another option is to take the discussion elsewhere; there are
mailing-lists dedicated to mail operations policies, to spam-fighting,
DNS reputation lists, hat-checks and more. Some of these are sometimes
germane to exim-users, but only to the extent of how Exim might be
configured to use certain systems or techniques or avoid falling foul of
someone else's criteria. Whether or not those criteria are appropriate
is not germane to this list, only how to help beleaguered admins run
systems that inter-operate with others.

On this list, exim-users@, signal is defined as being related to Exim
and if you're just telling others how to run their systems then that's
noise. A low signal-to-noise ratio drives away both those seeking help
and also those heavy power users and maintainers who can provide some of
the most technical help but have no interest in wading through sludge to
do so. Losing either one of those groups is a disservice to the
community and lowers the long-term value of the list for everyone.

Please respect the purpose of this list, as set out by those who
provide the resources that run the list.

Regards,
-Phil Pennock