It happens fairly often that a new member stumbles down this unfortunate path:
- Bob joins and reads about our voluntary-subscription mailing lists, such as hcoop-discuss.
- Wanting to contribute to the HCoop community, Bob uses the portal to subscribe to the lists.
- N months later, Bob notices that the lists can get quite a lot of traffic.
- Bob concludes that "HCoop sends him too much e-mail," forgetting that he can unsubscribe from the voluntary lists at any time on his portal preferences page.
Bob stops reading all HCoop mailing list messages, including the hcoop-announce list that we sometimes use for important time-sensitive announcements; or, even worse, Bob originally decided that he didn't need to forward HCoop mail to his main e-mail account since he would just check his HCoop mailbox regularly, but now he ends up not reading any HCoop e-mail at all, even hand-crafted personal messages from desperate admins, who will always assume that bob@hcoop.net goes somewhere that Bob reads regularly.
- Bob misses a message asking him well in advance if he'd like to object to an increase in member dues, or Bob misses a message telling him he must make a dues payment soon or be expelled from the co-op, or Bob misses a message telling him that he must modify how his web site is set up or it will be taken down, etc..
If Bob just unsubcribed from the voluntary lists, he would be down to less than a message a month on average from our announcements list, plus a low balance reminder once a month if he gets behind in payments. We don't consider this to meet any reasonable definition of "too much e-mail," so we'll hold you responsible for problems that arise from your not reading messages of either of these two remaining kinds promptly.