I am one of the system administrators at MailSpaces, and having seen some of the e-mails flying about I thought it would be useful to give a quick overview of how the system works, how to change your preferences, how to unsubscribe, and how you got here.
So first things first – This list has been moved wholesale from SmartGroups by your group administrator – The SG list closed yesterday, and was shut by Orange UK – We had made an offer to rescue the service when its closure was announced, which for internal reasons at Orange was turned down, so we have offered assistance to former SG list owners to migrate out by providing an archive download tool. We have not insisted at all that people migrate to mailspaces.com.
Anyhow, the way we had to get the archives out, and the members across, means that some people will appear to have had their preferences changed, and so are receiving e-mail when they didn't before.
There are two ways of changing preferences, one via the web interface, one by e-mail, explained below.
I'd like to make one thing really clear if I may – The old messages have been transferred to a members only ("Open") space – That means that no-one except the members of this group have access to the old messages. If you have suddenly started getting spam, it's not our fault. There is a spam epidemic at the moment, with volumes having gone through the roof. It is a co-incidence that the SG group has moved at the same time, but I really don't want anyone to go away with the impression that we are a bunch of spammers, or that we allow e-mail addresses to be misused, because we're not, and we don't.
Anyhow, you were sent a user name and password for the web interface a few days ago – It may have got caught in a spam trap as these things do from time to time, particularly if you use a web-based account such as Hotmail.
If you don't have your details, and you want them (you'll need them to see the discussion messages online), please let us know at (Address removed), and we'll send them to you.
So, e-mail first:
To join by e-mail – (Address removed)
To leave by e-mail – (Address removed)
To change delivery preferences –
Include in the e-mail the word delivery,
followed by one of the following:
no-email, plaintext-messages, enhanced-messages,
plaintext-digests, enhanced-digests
If you use HTML, choose one of the "enhanced" options
You can find more out about e-mail commands at http://www.mailspaces.com/help/articles/email
Web:
Go to http://www.mailspaces.com/spaces/blokart/preferences/
User basics: Set your user information
E-mail addresses: Set a secondary e-mail address
E-mail delivery: Change how you receive messages (live, digest, no-email) Change Password
Leave Space
MailSpaces.com is not just a mailing list, and has a number of extra functions that you can take advantage of – As standard, it "reads" all correspondence, tags it, and links it together, which is why you might see hyperlinks in your e-mail, and a list of "new tags" on the home page
There is also a "wiki" section, which allows you to store and share community knowledge, and to enable it to be edited by community members. This is also tagged in the same way, so you may see a tag in an e-mail that leads you to an article in the wiki
We also allows feeds, such as news items, or items from other groups, to be added, and linked in the same way
I'm sorry if some people are not happy with the change – We could only work with the material we had, which was e-mail addresses, and the message archive
I hope that these instructions will help you use this community better.
If you do have any problems, please e-mail me direct, or use (Address removed)
Kind regards
Nigel Cannings
