Administrivia: zsh.org blocking gmail servers

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As many of you are probably aware, delivery of email to the zsh-*
lists from any of gmail's services has become increasingly spotty.

This is happening because SORBS, a widely-used anti-spam blocklist,
has for the past several months been listing as "currently sending
spam" a growing subset of gmail's SMTP relay server IP addresses.

The current hosting of the zsh.org lists and archives is donated by
primenet.com.au, an ISP in Australia.  It is their network which
employs the SORBS blocklist, and they are not able to provide special
treatment for the zsh list addresses.  We are looking for other
hosting options, but it  is difficult to find an affordable solution
that is also able to address the technical problems of moving the list
software and archives.  Also, we're all volunteers and have limited
time to spend on this task.

As a workaround, I've created two new email addresses that will accept
mail intended for the zsh mailing lists and forward it to zsh.org:
  zsh-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  zsh-workers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The mailing list software requires that the list address appear in the
To: or Cc: headers, so in order to use one of the above forwarders you
must address your message (for example)
   To: zsh-workers@xxxxxxx
   Bcc: zsh-workers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This may result in two copies of the message reaching the list if you
happen to catch one of the gmail servers that is not on the blocklist,
and may also result in you receiving a bounce even though the Bcc copy
made it through; so this is not an ideal solution, but perhaps gets the
job done for now.

I am sending this message from a gmail-hosted account.  If you are
reading it, the forwarding address is working.  If you are a gmail
user and have difficulty getting email through to the lists, please
try Bcc'ing one of these alternate addresses.

I hope this is helpful, and thank you for your patience while we seek
other alternatives.

-- Bart


-- 
Barton E. Schaefer