Vote "no" on personal email to cgf (and others) about cygwin-related questions

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

Lately, I've been seeing an increase in people sending me personal email
with cygwin related questions.

So, I thought I would make it clear that this is not the accepted way to
get your questions answered or your problem solved for this or any other
project which has a project mailing list.

So, please don't send me personal email.

I sympathize if you are unable to send email due to ORBS blockage but
that does not mean that you automatically have a direct line to my
personal email.  It means that you fix the ORBS problem or find another
email provider which does not suffer from open-relaying.

I am sorry if the ORBS email policy seems harsh but I do not set the
policy, so complaining to me will not do much good.  In any event, my
mailbox should not be considered an alternative to the cygwin mailing
list in the situations where you are blocked.

I imagine that every other frequent contributor to this mailing list feels
exactly the same way about this.  I seem to be noticing that they are also
getting an increased amount of personal email.

So, unless instructed otherwise, please use the cygwin mailing list as
the forum for getting your cygwin questions answered.

In fact, if you really want to make everyone happy, try using the
mailing list archives before firing off your question or observation.
If you are reporting a problem, odds are that the problem has been
reported before.

If you can't figure out a search term that will satisfactorily zero in
on what you're trying to report, then, at the very least, check the last
couple of days of mailing list traffic.  Pay attention to email from
Corinna, or Earnie Boyd, or Chuck Wilson, or Larry Hall, or Tim Prince,
or me (there are probably others that I'm missing).  Those people
usually are aware of problems in their general areas and try to provide
solutions.  It's likely that the problem that you just noticed was
reported by someone else days ago and one of the above people has
already responded with an observation.

This doesn't mean that we'll stop answering questions but maybe if
everyone took a couple of extra minutes to do this it would cut down
slightly on the need to answer the same question over and over again
here.

cgf

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