[Cob] Coblist Shutdown

[Shannon Dealy]

Hi Everyone,

Effective immediately (as in you won't be able to reply to this email on the 
list), I have decided to shutdown the coblist. There are a number of reasons 
for this:

1. The list has received very little traffic for several years and none in
the last 14 months.

2. The coblist requires regular maintenance on my part and is long overdue
for a major upgrade which will take a fair bit of time that I can't
really spare.

3. Google has declared the coblist to be evil and will not even accept 
messages from the list, so they are not even being placed in people's
spam folders. This effectively cuts the size of the coblist in half.

Ultimately, I think the coblist has served its purpose. I created it to 
provide a common place for people to learn about cob and discuss it with each 
other at a time when there was no other place on the internet to do so. In the 
28 years since then, the internet has changed greatly and there are many ways 
people can communicate and learn about cob, probably most young cobbers are 
not even aware of the coblist.

Sadly, half the coblist will not receive this email, but there is nothing I 
can do about that.

The coblist archives will remain online even after the shutdown of the list.

Feel free to email me directly (not through the now shutdown list) if you have 
any questions.

NOTE: For those of you who are interested, I have placed the details of the 
Google problem after my signature line. Hopefully it is not to much of a
"rant".

Happy cobbing and best regards to all of you.

Shannon C. Dealy               |       DeaTech Research Inc.
dealy at deatech.com              | Biotechnology Development Services
Telephone USA: +1 541-929-4089 |      USA and the Netherlands
Netherlands:   +31 85 208 5570 |          www.deatech.com

===== The Google problem =====

Google has repeatedly declared the coblist to be spam. While there has been no 
traffic on the list, every month you get a reminder regarding your coblist 
subscription and Google has been rejecting a large percentage of those. 
Despite the fact that the coblist has been in existance longer than Google has 
and during this time has always followed best practices, requiring 
confirmation of all email addresses/subscriptions. The coblist has been fully 
compliant with Google's requirements for email list messages, but it makes no 
difference and using their complaint channels has no long term effect. As half 
of the coblist subscribers are using Google for their email services either 
directly through Gmail or indirectly by having Google manage email for their 
domain, this means I get several hundred email bounces in months when Google 
decides to block me.

Unfortunately, the Google problem is even more severe than the above suggests,
when they block the coblist, they also block all other email from my domain 
i.e. my business email which makes the problems worse.

Just to be clear, NO OTHER email company is doing this to me and all sites 
which provide services to check mail server reputations and email issues
all say my reputation is perfect (no blacklists of any sort) and there are no 
other problems they can detect.

If you are considering using Google for email, you might want to ask yourself 
if you should trust them (people who are currently using Google will not be 
able to receive this message). Keep in mind, these messages to the coblist 
were not being placed in spam folders, they were being refused and returned to 
the sender. This means verified coblist members using Google have no way of 
knowing they have been effectively removed from not just the coblist, but from 
receiving any messages from my company and who knows how many other companies
who are legitimately corresponding with them. I am not talking about spammers,
or unsolicited email of any sort (I have never engaged in either), only people 
engaged in legitimate email correspondence with people who expect to receive 
it.

For the more technically inclined of you (because it is the obvious question), 
no my server does not share any IP addresses with other servers and it has had 
sole possession of its current IP address for over a decade. Additionally, the 
IP block it is part of is not on any of the top 100 public blacklists.

FWIW.