[dvlug] dvlug.org reboot

[Rick Moen]

Note: Grant locked me out without notice, last night, of the newest of
his outsourced "finalized" mailing lists, the "list at dvlug.org" one
newly handled by mailgun.com.  However, I'm retaining the CC for the
benefit of others who may wish to crosspost.  DVLUG members:  Bear in
mind going forward that Grant would have no qualms about unilaterally
dropping you off his DVLUG mailing list without notice, if he ever finds
what you're saying inconvenient and wants you to cease being heard.

But the _more_ astonishing plot twist is that Grant didn't actually
create a mailing list(!) -- which matter I'll get to below:


Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> Thinking of archives ...
> Ye older list ...
> If you - or anyone - wants to download the entire raw mbox format
> archive, that's publicly available on The Internet:
> http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/dvlug.mbox/dvlug.mbox

And that neatly raises the  ability to _export_.  Some places that
purport to be new-user friendly mail services don't permit retrieving a
mail archive in commodity format.  Neither Mailgun nor the external
www.mail-archive.com service Grant has adapted as a tacked-on HTML
archiver lets you export message traffic in a way that would permit
moving to new hosting.  So, when you move, everything to date gets lost 
-- which longtime DVLUG members will note that Grant has done at least a
time or two with his prior outsourcing efforts.

More remarkably, now that I read in detail their documentation, it
emerges that Mailgun's service doesn't actually support mailing
lists at all, i.e., there is _no mailing list manager_ software the user
might interact with to join and leave a "list", to suspend delivery,
etc. (as with Mailman, Sympa, ezmlm, mlmmj, or even Majorodomo).  Grant
basically appears to running "list at dvlug.org" as an /etc/aliases entry
on the Mailgun outsourced host, whose fanout to a set of constitutent
addresses he personally manages via Mailgun's Web interface.  So, it's
not actually a mailing list in the first place!  The appearance of an
integral Web archive?  He achieved that by including
"archive at mail-archive.com" in the /etc/aliases entry.

So, that's another of the reason I continue to make this mailing list
usable by DVLUG -- so that it will actually _have_ a mailing list.