A note about email

Our email server receives lots of spam. An overwhelming amount of spam. In some of our mailboxes, the ratio is over 1000:1 (one legitimate message for every thousand spam messages). This situation has been consuming far too much of our volunteer time and resources.

Spam filters don't help us as they simply shunt messages deemed spam to a separate folder. We still have to examine them in case of a false positive (a legitimate message improperly flagged as spam), thus saving little time. Spam blocking software helps, but it too can't reliably detect all spam.

So, we've instituted a change to our server that requires any unsolicited email sent to us to contain the term <notspam> as the first part of the message subject. "Unsolicited" means your email address isn't known to our server. Your email address becomes known two ways: either we send you an email first (mailing list messages count) or you send us a message with <notspam> as the first part of the subject. (The email server will strip this off, so we'll never see it in your subject). Once your email address is known, you can correspond with us as usual.

If you send us an email without the <notspam> indicator and your email address isn't known to our server, you will receive a delivery failure in your Inbox. Simply open up your Sent folder and find the message you sent, click Forward, put <notspam> in the subject (make sure to include the angle brackets), and click Send.

It's unfortunate that we need to shift the onus for the spam problem onto email senders. We ask for your understanding and regret any inconvenience you may experience.