As those of you who have been reading Cube-Lovers for the last few months
are well aware, we have been suffering through (almost) weekly
advertisements sent by some nutcase trying to sell magazines. In the past,
I have been able to defeat unwanted advertising on Cube-Lovers by simply
having a chat with the advertiser (or his postmaster). But the magazine
guy is determined to send a weekly copy of his advertisement to every
mailing list in the world, despite all objections -- there's really no way
to shut him off short of some form of mailing list moderation.

So we're forced to make Cube-Lovers a moderated mailing list. Starting
with this message, every message sent to Cube-Lovers will be screened
before it gets distributed to the rest of you. For the moment, some of the
steps in the screening process are manual, so there may be a delay before a
message you submit gets out to the rest of the list. That's the price we
pay to keep Cube-Lovers from becoming a conduit that delivers more
advertising than content.

>From your point of view, this change should be completely invisible (beyond
the improved content and increased latency). It is still the case that you
should address all submissions to Cube-Lovers@AI.MIT.EDU and all
administrative correspondence to Cube-Lovers-Request@AI.MIT.EDU.

There are some other advantages to the new scheme beyond filtering out
advertising:

1. Filtering out other inappropriate messages, such as misdirected
subscription requests.

2. Better handling of mailer bounce messages. This change should almost
entirely eliminate cases where you submit a message to Cube-Lovers
and some mailer sends you an error report. Almost all such messages
should now be routed correctly to me. (Of course, mailers will still
sometimes screw up -- please forward any mailer errors you -do- get
back to me.)

3. Less messages like this one.

4. For the moment, the archive at ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/cube-lovers
continues to accumulate the un-filtered messages. But eventually, I
hope to keep it free of trash as well.

If this message is delivered smoothly, it should be followed by two more
messages that arrived while I was debugging this stuff. And you will
-never- see the magazine advertisement that was submitted last weekend!

- Alan (Cube-Lovers-Request@AI.MIT.EDU)