As anyone with an email account is probably aware, the Internet has
become inundated with spam and other types of junk email.  For the average
user it's a tremendous annoyance.  For anyone with fairly high visibility,
the deluge of email, viruses and such has become nearly unmanageable.
At the height of a virus outbreak, for example, I can be receiving 1000
emails an hour.  So many email messages were arriving so fast that I
couldn't even download them as fast as they are coming in, even with a
broadband connection.  On an average day I get thousands of junk emails
- typically at least 200MB worth.

In order to deal with this flood, I have been compelled to add layers
of spam and virus filters, both at my server and at my workstation.
Now I have about 300-400 messages a day get through the filters.  This
includes the usual classical music mailing list traffic of 10-12 messages
a day.  So now the challenge ha become how to spot the good mailing list
messages among all the ads for porn sites, Cialis, Rolex watches,
mortgages, and various other garbage.

Now with this much "noise" trying to conceal the good MCML posts it can
be surprisingly easy to miss posts I would otherwise distribute.  I do
my best, but I can't possibly open every message to see if it might be
a post instead of spam.  So, this process is prone to errors.  If you
have submitted a post to the list and it was not distributed (you can
always check the archives if you are unsure), please resubmit the post.
I haven't rejected a post in a long time, and in general if your post
is about music it should be distributed.

There are a couple of things that you can do to help minimize the chances
that your post is thrown away inadvertently.  The first is to choose a
good subject line.  It seems that most of the posts I delete accidentally
are first time posts.  Sometimes these have subject lines that are a bit
tangential or not explicitly about music.  As I go largely on subject
line to determine if I should open a message to check it out for the
list, this is very important.  The second issue is that if a message is
for any reason MIME encoded, it runs about a 99% chance of being deleted.
As we all know by now, messages to the list must be plain text only,
with no attachments, no images, no formatted text, no HTML (URLs or
"links" are OK), and no fancy signatures.

I'm doing all I can to minimize errors, but I doubt I'll reach perfection
any time soon.  Please bear with me and help me out if you can.  It will
be most appreciated.  Thanks for your patience.

Dave
MCML Moderator