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The recent discussion has been most stimulating. Here are some issues which have appeared from the list mediator's perspective.

1. If you change the settings in your email program so that your message comes "from" a different address to the one you have subscribed, you will not notice anything in terms of receiving postings (as long as your old address is still good of course; otherwise see below). But if you try to make a posting the server will "bounce" it to me as a "non-member submission." It takes a literal view and does not know that the two addresses are the same person. I can then re-submit your posting so that it appears to have come directly from you, but this causes delay.

The solution is for me to unsubscribe your old address and resubscribe you under the "from" address you are now using. You would in this case get a "welcome to the RDG" message which might seem inexplicable. In the recent spate of postings I have done this, in contact with the relevant person, about four times. I hereby announce that in the future I will do it unilaterally.

The list can be set up to allow non-member submissions, but then everyone would get the junk email which now bounces to me and is deleted ("make a million dollars in your spare time by sending out junk emails ..."). The people who do these things love especially to find listservs like ours. Also this way I get to keep all the million dollar schemes to myself :-)

2. If your address becomes undeliverable then every posting bounces to me with the error message. As previously announced, if this goes on long enough I will unsubscribe your address. I cannot tell you about this because your address is undeliverable. I cannot re-subscribe you when your email problem is fixed because I will not know. So, if you have a temporary email problem, you might get unsubscribed. You can check whether this happened by sending "who restitution" to <majorodomo@maillist.ox.ac.uk>. If you get a list of subscribers, you are on it. If you get a message saying only members can have the list, you are not.

As to what counts as "long enough" for me to take this unilateral action, I make the decision on pragmatic grounds which almost certainly would not stand up to judicial review. There is no set number of errors I will endure. It is a combination of how busy is the list and how busy am I.

3. Please stop and think whether your posting is likely to be of general interest. In particular, I am not happy that the RDG be used for postings which amount to ad hominem arguments. Also, if you find yourself writing about exactly what someone said in an earlier posting, and exactly what it might have meant, then there is less likelihood that 239 other people want to read it. I am not saying that any posting with a quotation in it must be disallowed, because these are often needed for context. But please be considerate of the person to whom you replying, and also to the rest of the list, and consider a private reply.

Lionel