Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Many people post questions to the iText mailing list. They follow the rules and subscribe. However, some people are confused by the fact that third party services also offer the possibility to post question. Nabble is one of these services.

Unfortunately, your mail doesn't reach the real mailing-list if you post a question on Nabble. This is clearly indicated in yellow:

I quote: This post has NOT been accepted by the mailing list yet.

Accepting a post "by the mailing list" demands plenty of manual work. Why? Because the mailing list address is well known and as such the target of many SPAM attacks. An administrator has to remove this SPAM, and approve the messages that are genuine question manually.

Sorting out genuine questions among a shipload of SPAM is a boring task, and during this manual process errors are made. For instance: the above message was accidentally deleted. This wasn't done deliberately; it happened because somebody wasn't awake yet, but decided to start working anyway. In any case, this specific message is gone and it can no longer be accepted. We're sorry for that. The yellow warning will never disappear from Nabble and you shouldn't expect us to create an account on Nabble to answer the question "off-list".

Morale of this blog post: follow the rules and subscribe. If you don't want to comply to make our lives easier, at least do it for yourself: to avoid that your mail gets lost and your question remains unanswered.

Thank you in advance!

See also Why you don't get an answer on the mailing list