REMOVED::ANN: yahMAIL is dead - long live son of yahMAIL!

[Mark Daniel_2]

My regrets that this is a long(ish) post.

I recently made an announcement of a new piece of VMS open-source software with the above subject. Later that day I received the following email.

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Dear Mark Daniel,

We appreciate that you are a registered user of the HP Support Forums, and see you have recently utilized the Support Forums service. However, your message 'ANN: yahMAIL is dead - long live son of yahMAIL!' had to be removed due to one or more of the following reasons.

1. You had requested the removal of your message.
2. The message was a duplicate posting.
3. The message contained advertising of goods or services.
4. The question was off-topic and did not align with the charter of the HP Support Forums.
5. Language, personal rants, or material deemed abusive, defamatory or obscene.
6. The posting contained private information on other users and/or HP employees.
7. Other reasons deemed necessary by the HP Support Forums staff.

We encourage you to share your technical knowledge and tap into the vast experience of other community members. All members will learn more when reading messages of technical value, whether they are new questions or replies.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,
HP Support Forums Team
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Well I don't understand! There can't be so many ITRC postings removed that it only warrants a form-letter. How about a real explanation? This can only be an example of over-zealous ITRC police.

Looking at the reasons given in the email the only one that seemed as if it might apply was "3. The message contained advertising of goods or services." It certainly contained an announcment of goods but the description 'advertisement' to me implies marketing in pursuit of income. As this is open-source (and even though I detest the term) freeware, made available in an effort to provide useful and high-quality software NOT commercially viable in the VMS market-place. Are we (the ITRC users) to understand that we cannot use this forum to inform our peers of the availability of such?

(Typing into this pigeon hole is such a chore it's tempting to give up here and just close the window.)

I have also spent time re-reading the ITRC 'Terms of Use' and can find nothing to suggest that non-commercial announcements are not allowed.

http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/help/lpTermAndCond.do

The closest it gets is "HP retains the right to remove messages that include an advertisement for sale".

Now, so many people have basically abandoned c.o.v. because of the low signal-to-noise ratio, and they have been encouraged to migrate to this closed and proprietory forum, that to not be able to provide such notification means that for many the knowlege of the availability of such could be greatly delayed.

How about a clarification and ruling on this issue. Can it be used for non-commercial announcements?

[Karl Rohwedder]

Personally, I have no problems with information about new/upgraded 'freeware' for OpenVMS, as long as it is not too big. It may contain links to more and deeper infos.
Discussions about such freeware should be directed to specific forums.

regards Kalle

[Alex Daniels]

I think it's totally wrong to have removed that posting.

Mark has spent over a year of his own time creating a product and has then made it available to the VMS community for free.

I certainly would not have classed the original message as advertising goods or services, but instead an announcement, that is relevent to VMS sites.

[Jan van den Ende]

Mark,

as a (bitter) consolation: You are not the only one to have received such "Removed" messages.
And I also have been unable to ever get a more detailed justification.
Usually I choose a different wording and post again, and more often than not I is allowed to remain then.

But really, announcements like this ARE very valuable to a significant fraction of VMS users, and as such should NOT be removed! (unless clearly commercial of course, but for that you definitely do not qualify).


Then again, it IS a fine balance between what to allow and what to refuse. Your own description of c.o.v. demonstrates that.

Maybe you can try to enter the subject again, and than put clear emphasis on the NON-commerciality?

hth,

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Craig A Berry]

Mark,

I would guess some automated content sniffer kicked out your post in a report and no individual capable of better content analysis than the machine ever got involved. I'm sure no one at HP or elsewhere who cares anything about software availability on VMS has any objection to hearing about your fine work.

There must be some way to tune your wording to get it past the censors, but with such a vague list of reasons given for the removal it's hard to say what that would be.

In any case, keep up the good work and keep announcing it in places where the right folks will see it, regardless of what the authorities think. You'll notice Ken Farmer picked it up and put it on openvms.org; it might be good to include him directly in future announcements.

[Clark Powell]

I just stumbled on this announcement by accident but since I'm an Yahmail user I'm curious as to what Mark had to say. I don't see a new version of Yahmail on the WASD site does that mean that there is a new package of FREEWARE/OPENSOURCE (please Mr. Man, don't censor my message!) software that will replace it. Am I correct?

thanks
Clark Powell

[Alex Daniels]

Yes there is a new OpenSource, not for profit, non-commerial, not for sale, non-advertising product, that is replacing yahmail.

It's called soyMAIL.

The uncensored announcment can be seen here...

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.vms/browse_thread/thread/6787efceeee4020f/e594502ae3452334?q=soymail&rnum=1#e594502ae3452334

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Mark,

Sad but most forum members have read it.
Now we know how the Chinees must feel.

Wim

[Mark Daniel_2]

Can't help myself ...

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1002590

[Robert_Boyd]

That posting certainly seems to be in the category of good and services being proferred. My goodness!!!

[John Gillings]

Mark,

I don't think the comparison with the Availability Manager announcement is quite valid, but I take the point.

Personally I didn't think your announcement was in breach of any policies. I was even tempted to download it and check it out myself. Please send me copies of all your correspondence, and I'll try to get a more detailed explanation of the ruling for you.

I believe HP should be ENCOURAGING people to create and distribute products that enhance HP products. Perhaps a solution would be to create a category for non-commercial announcements? Those that don't want to read quasi advertising material can simply avoid that category.

[Mark Daniel_2]

Hi John.

At the risk of cheekily tempting the Fates again please find included the original announcement (the only other correspondence to me has been the form-letter email included at the top of this thread). Many thanks for trying to discover whether this was a simple mistake that easily could have been corrected or counter-productive company policy enforced by ITRC militia. I was beginning to think HP (and I know you are not 'it' ... but better than ;-) was ignoring this. It's a carbon-copy of the announcement made concurrently on c.o.v. and that Alex has generously provided us with a pathway to

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.vms/browse_thread/thread/6787efceeee4020f/e594502ae3452334?q=soymail&rnum=1#e594502ae3452334

I am baffled how anyone, not stalled between Freud's ages of two and four years, could take offence at what was obviously an attempt at humorous play when trying to generate a handle for some new software. Even more than twenty-four months after coming up with the name soyMAIL I still smile (which is perhaps more of an insight than I should be providing). When explaining it to my daughter living in New Zealand she took a second to register and then burst out laughing saying it was 'typical'. Perhaps that wasn't a compliment after-all ;-) Perhaps it should have been left at /cgi-bin/yahmail2 or or /cgi-bin/yahmailii or (just to make it interesting for our Apache brethren) /cgi-bin/yahmailII.

Of course, thanks for your time, and to all those here and on c.o.v. who have also remarked they found the removal suprising.

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Subject: "ANN: yahMAIL is dead - long live son of yahMAIL!"

The sometime refered to, long awaited (by some), much anticipated (again, by some), twelve months in the making, successor to yahMAIL - son of yahMAIL - is now available for (BETA) download

http://wasd.vsm.com.au/wasd/

It supports Apache, OSU and WASD on all VMS platforms and versions from V6.0.

Note that this is a *BETA* release - so be careful with it!

Obviously don't bet the company on it. I have been using this for my personal email ever since it became somewhat usable (~four months ago) and it seems pretty stable. Of course that's one of the purposes of BETA testing, to get it off your test-bench and away from your own patterns of usage. A small band of hardy BETA-testers have already got their hands on this and reported issues that have been fixed and made function suggestions. Be gentle with your comments and wish-list items - you don't want to discourage me too vigorously so early in this phase!

If you're going to create a specific language or help file(s) then note that although the contents are fairly stable, as it's a BETA release it may need revision in the not too distant future.

Here's some more information:

Overview:
http://wasd.vsm.com.au/soymail/-/doc/soymail_overview.pdf
http://wasd.vsm.com.au/soymail/-/doc/soymail_overview.html
Install and Admin:
http://wasd.vsm.com.au/soymail/-/doc/soymail_admin.pdf
http://wasd.vsm.com.au/soymail/-/doc/soymail_admin.html
On-line user Help:
http://wasd.vsm.com.au/cgi-bin/soymail?help

If you're going to email me privately then include "soyMAIL" in the subject line so that if you end up quarantined by anti-SPAM you can be relatively easily identified.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
Mark Daniel http://wasd.vsm.com.au/adelaide
mailto:Mark.Daniel@wasd.vsm.com.au (Mark.Daniel@dsto.defence.gov.au)
A pox on the houses of all SPAMers. Make that two poxes.
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Phillip Thayer]

I think that not encouraging the creation of software for OpenVMS by non-owners (DEC/Compaq/HP) is most likely a main reason that OpenVMS is not as widely used as it is now.

Look at Windows. The strength of Windows is not the technical ability of the operating system but rather the market recoignizability of the OS and the avaliability of software to perform just about anything a person would want to do with the OS. Part of the reason that this is so is because of the Microsoft Partners program that was started back in the early 1990's. This program not only encouraged non-owners of the OS to develop commercially viable software it assisted them in the developement and marketing of the software through Microsoft themselves. Many of the software packages that are currently used in Windows were originally written by Microsoft Partners who are now very rich and have been integrated into the Microsoft organization.

Along the same lines, if DEC/Compac/HP did something similar and ASSISTED the writers of the software then maybe OpenVMS would be a more publiclly recognizable OS. As it stands now, when I talk to another IT professional and tell them my speciality is OpenVMS, 75% of them have no clue what it is. I simply tell them that it is the midrange OS that MW Windows NT based systems was cloned from :) and they kind of look at me with this surprised look. It opens up a lot of intersting conversations. You whould try it sometime. :)

Phil

[Mark Daniel_2]

Apparently "no correspondence will be entered into".