July

empty those piggy banks!

Many people have noted that we are not very forward with our pitches for mutual aid. A common complaint has been that it is difficult to even find out how to donate. There is a very good reason for this: our limitation has been labor, not money. It requires a fair chunk of change to keep riseup.net going, but you kind folks have been kicking down enough to pay the bills.

One reason for this is that we are incredibly miserly. We have always made great efforts to squeeze all we can out of the low cost things available to us. We have taken a DIY approach to everything.

This era has come to an end. Although we are still DIY, we have reached the point where we need reliable hardware and much more bandwidth. These things are going to dramatically increase our expenses. In the long term, we will actually be saving money, but there is a big jump from where we are now to the next level.

So… it is time to empty those piggy banks! Money is an amoral thing, yet for now, with the way the world is, we need a lot. Right now.

Please visit http://riseup.net/donate and give with reckless abandon. Thanks in advance, and double thanks to those who have already donated.

fight tofu!

OK, list admins, we need your help: AOL is reporting that 2.5% of all the list messages we send their way are being marked as spam by their users. This percentage is way too high, and is causing us all kinds of trouble.

Remember, only you can prevent tofu! What is tofu? Activist spam. In keeping with netiquette and basic common sense, it is our policy to shut down lists where the list admins are subscribing people without their consent. However, we can’t be 24 hour list cops. Trust us: this is not what we signed up for.

Everyone will be a lot happier and less grumpy if all you list admins could show a little more responsibility in your duties. In other words: DON’T SUBSCRIBE PEOPLE AGAINST THEIR WILL. When you do, it makes everyone pissed off. We are tired of getting hate mail and dealing with AOL. It sucks.

Most importantly, tofu makes activists very frustrated. Most people have a very complicated relationship with email: the more one is flooded with tofu, the less useful email becomes.

folder name changes

People who use web mail or IMAP to check their mail have server side folders (POP users do not have access to the server side folders). Historically, we have had the server folders “sent-mail” and “drafts.”

As email has evolved, the new consensus is that these folders should be called “Sent” and “Drafts.” We are changing the folder names to match this standard in order to make our collaboration with other tech collectives easier.

For the next month, both the old and new names can be used. “sent-mail” will be an alias for “Sent” and “drafts” will be an alias for “Drafts.” Do not delete any of these folders: deleting one will erase the other as well. If you have your IMAP mail client configured to use ‘sent-mail’ and ‘drafts,’ you have one month to change it to ‘Sent’ and ‘Drafts.’

Note: although we are anti-capitalists, the capitalization for ‘Sent’ and ‘Drafts’ is very important.

spam filtering is back

Spam filtering has now been installed on the new mail server (there is still no spam filtering on the list server).

All mail accounts are now scanned by the spam filter:

People who have not chosen to enable spam filtering have a very conservative filter. It will catch less spam and (hopefully) never mistake a good message for spam.

People who have enabled spam filtering have a fairly aggressive filter. When it makes a mistake, you can correct the mistake by placing a copy of the message in the server side folder “Mistakes” or by forwarding, as an attachment, to the address mistakes@riseup.net. A mistake is when a good message was identified as spam, or a spam got through without being caught.

for more information, see http://help.riseup.net/spam

seattle volunteer meetings

If you are interested in regular riseup.net volunteer work parties/meetings taking place in seattle, drop a note to redcursor@riseup.net.