The Hawaii Macintosh & Apple Users’ Society (HMAUS) web site is at http://hmaus.org/. Official contacts, event calendar, membership details and other information about HMAUS are available there. Although HMAUS-L is open to the public, everybody is encouraged to also join HMAUS, which publishes the Signal magazine and has useful and informative meetings and activities.
The HMAUS-L charter describes the purposes for which the mailing list was formed, and the general areas that are considered on-topic and off-topic:
“The HMAUS-L mailing list is for HMAUS and other Hawaii Apple user group announcements, as well as general discussion related to Apple and its products, including problems, questions and answers. It is not a forum for advertising or for selling hardware or software. Participation in this mailing list is open to the general public.”
To subscribe to the HMAUS-L mailing list, send an e-mail message to HMAUS-L-SUBSCRIBE@pfr2.net or fill out the form on the HMAUS-L Info Page at:
http://pfr2.net/mailman/listinfo/hmaus-l_pfr2.net
You will receive a subscribe confirmation request via e-mail. After you have confirmed that you want to subscribe, you will begin to receive messages from HMAUS-L. You will receive a “Welcome to the “HMAUS-L” mailing list” message, which includes the password you will need to access the HMAUS-L Member Options Login Page.
To unsubscribe from the HMAUS-L mailing list, send an e-mail message to HMAUS-L-UNSUBSCRIBE@pfr2.net or login on the HMAUS-L Member Options Login Page at:
http://pfr2.net/mailman/options/hmaus-l_pfr2.net
and click the Unsubscribe button. You will receive an unsubscribe confirmation request via e-mail. After you have confirmed that you want to unsubscribe, you will no longer receive messages from HMAUS-L.
The mailing list sends messages either as they are received or in a digest. The digest gathers together all of the individual messages sent to HMAUS-L and delivers them in a single message once per day. If you feel that the quantity of HMAUS-L messages is difficult to handle in your e-mailbox, you may wish to receive the digest. The digest can be delivered in Plain Text or MIME (multipart/digest) format. The option of whether and how to receive the digest is a member option.
If you are going on vacation or otherwise wish to stop receiving messages temporarily, you can stop delivery without unsubscribing. When you wish to begin receiving messages again, you can restart delivery. Delivery is a member option.
The easiest way to configure your member options is to login to the HMAUS-L Member Options Login Page at:
http://pfr2.net/mailman/options/hmaus-l_pfr2.net
(This URL is listed at the bottom of every HMAUS-L post.) You can access all of your member options from the web page, and you can also change your e-mail address there as well.
The above should cover most of what most users need to know, but there is also a decent manual. (The LISTNAME is “hmaus-l”; the DOMAIN and WEBSERVER are “pfr2.net”.)
(Web) http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
(PDF) http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member.pdf
(text) http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member.txt
If you have other list management requests, problems with unsubscribing, or troubles with or questions about the HMAUS-L list itself, please send an e-mail message to the list manager at HMAUS-L-OWNER@pfr2.net. A human will eventually see the message. Please do not send administrative requests to HMAUS-L@pfr2.net.
If the HMAUS-L message processor has difficulty sending messages to your account and the messages ‘bounce,’ whether due to mail server or spam filter misconfiguration, mailbox full, disk full, or other problem, it will attempt to send several subsequent messages. If the messages continue to bounce, your account will be disabled and you will receive notices that it has been disabled. When the problem on your end has been resolved, you may then re-enable your account.
Challenge/response queries to add HMAUS-L to your list of accepted correspondents will not be answered, and your subscription will be removed. It is your responsibility to add the mailing list to your address whitelist.
To send a message to the entire list of HMAUS-L subscribers, send it as an e-mail message to HMAUS-L@pfr2.net. You may reply to a list message, but if you want the whole list of subscribers to see your reply, be sure to set the CC: field to HMAUS-L@pfr2.net, otherwise only the person who originally sent the message will see your reply. Please consider making your reply visible to the entire list, as this can begin a dialog among list members as well as help others who are following the topic. However, if your response is not of general interest or is off-topic, please do not copy it to the whole list.
To access the archives, you must first login on the HMAUS-L Member Options Login Page at:
http://pfr2.net/mailman/options/hmaus-l_pfr2.net
Once you have done that, in addition to being able to modify your member options, you can access the HMAUS-L Archives at:
http://pfr2.net/mailman/private/hmaus-l_pfr2.net/
If you get the response “No such list” when trying to access a month in the archives, then something went wrong with the login; try again.
Messages sent from e-mail addresses that are not subscribed to HMAUS-L will be rejected. Subscribing is a requirement for posting (this helps keep spam off the list). Only list subscribers may view the archives.
HMAUS-L is an unmoderated mailing list. Nobody reviews submitted messages for content before they are distributed. Distribution of submitted messages (and the digests) is automatic. Once a message is submitted, it cannot be recalled or its distribution halted. Neither HMAUS, the list manager, nor the list hosting provider take any responsibility for the content of posted messages. Responsibility for the contents of posted messages resides solely with the poster.
Attachments and graphics are not allowed in HMAUS-L messages; these take up space on people’s hard disks and are contrary to the point of a mailing list. If there is a binary resource that needs to be referenced, it should be made available on the Internet in an appropriate fashion (such as on a web page or FTP site), and a URL included in the message. Please do not send screen snapshots; instead, put them on your web page and send a URL. Please try not to send messages with styles or in HTML. Not everybody reading HMAUS-L is running on a Macintosh, or even a PC. Some people may not be receiving the messages on their own computer. Attachments and other binary resources, styles and HTML cause problems for some e-mail programs.
Netiquette suggests that subscribers should refrain from posting off-topic messages. In addition, complaints about off-topic messages are themselves off-topic, and should be addressed directly to the offending poster and/or to the list manager, not to the whole mailing list. Please do not send personal announcements, such as a change of e-mail address, to the entire list.
Allowing buy/sell postings was debated before we started HMAUS-L, but with over 150 subscribers, most of whom probably have something to buy or sell, we anticipated that discussion would soon be drowned out by all of the advertisements. There are other places, such as newsgroups, that exist specifically for that purpose and reach a much wider audience.
The same off-topic posting prohibition applies to job opportunities. There are dozens of websites devoted to matching up jobs offered and wanted. If HMAUS-L doesn’t meet a particular need, such as a place to post job announcements or advertisements, then the proper thing to do is either to join an additional forum that can meet that need, or to gather others with similar interests and create one.
Hoaxes, chain letters, and off-topic humor should not be posted to the mailing list. Please remember, there are over 150 people who have subscribed to the HMAUS-L mailing list with the expectation of receiving on-topic messages. Off-topic and irrelevant posts do a disservice to our subscribers, and make our mailing list less useful. There are tens of thousands of newsgroups and other mailing lists, several of which are probably appropriate places to post messages that are off-topic for HMAUS-L.
Please do not forward virus or Trojan horse alerts, calls to stop legislative action, or any other warnings that you receive via e-mail. In nearly all cases, these are hoaxes. If you feel that this information is important and appropriate for posting to HMAUS-L, then please check appropriate sources and verify that the information is correct before you post–do not ask the mailing list to verify the information for you. Some excellent sources of information are:
CERT
http://www.cert.org/advisories/
Urban Legends Reference Pages
http://www.snopes.com/
Please respect sources. If you are not the originator of the message or information, please provide an indication of the original writer or source, and where additional information may be obtained. If you are forwarding a news item, please provide a URL to the original article or mailing list where it was found. Rather than posting the complete text of a long article, post a summary and the URL instead. Please do not forward or copy e-mail to the mailing list without permission from the original sender.
Here are several references that describe netiquette and effective participation in mailing lists:
Netiquette
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/
Dear Emily Postnews
http://www.templetons.com/brad/emily.html
RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
TidBITS’ Mailing List Manners
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1141
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html