Mailing lists

To obtain additional information about Speak Freely, notification of new releases, and to meet other Speak Freely users to discuss problems and solutions, tips and tricks, and your experiences with the package, the following Internet mailing lists are available.

speak-freely@fourmilab.ch
Unmoderated list for discussion of any topic related to Speak Freely. Each message posted to the list is immediately copied to all subscribers. To subscribe, send an electronic mail message containing the word "subscribe" in the message body (not as the Subject) to speak-freely-request@fourmilab.ch. You can receive the same information in periodic digest form by subscribing to speak-freely-digest@fourmilab.ch, described below, reducing the number of individual messages you receive.

speak-freely-digest@fourmilab.ch
Periodic digest of messages sent to speak-freely@fourmilab.ch. The digest is updated every several days depending on the amount of traffic received; when traffic grows to a sufficient volume to warrant it, daily digests will be published. Subscribing to speak-freely-digest instead of speak-freely dramatically reduces the number of individual messages from the mailing list that arrive in your in-box, albeit at the cost of less timely delivery of information. To subscribe, send an electronic mail message containing the word "subscribe" in the message body (not as the Subject) to speak-freely-digest-request@fourmilab.ch.

Only subscribers to these lists may publish messages to them.

Mailing List Archives

The speak-freely mailing list at fourmilab.ch has been archived since its inception in January of 1996. You can retrieve issues of "speak-freely-digest" all the way back to Volume 1, Number 2 (Number 1 was expended in testing the list server, and contained no actual postings).

To obtain a list of all the archived digests, send E-mail to:

speak-freely-digest-request@fourmilab.ch
with the word:
index
as the first line of the message body (not the Subject).

You will receive by return post a listing of all the archived digests, for example: 

-rw-rw----   1 majordom majordom   24951 Jul 18 02:08 v01.n060
-rw-rw----   1 majordom majordom   24921 Jul 19 01:54 v01.n061
-rw-rw----   1 majordom majordom   30070 Jul 22 16:18 v01.n062
-rw-rw----   1 majordom majordom   27329 Jul 24 20:47 v01.n063
-rw-rw----   1 majordom majordom   26120 Jul 29 20:06 v01.n064
-rw-rw----   1 majordom majordom   23304 Aug  2 07:34 v01.n065

The last item in this Unix-format long directory listing is the file name. To retrieve a given issue of the digest, send an E-mail to

speak-freely-digest-request@fourmilab.ch
with the command:
get filename
where filename is replaced with the filename you wish to receive, for example, vol01.n061 for the digest published on 19th July 1997.

Since the digests are compiled automatically, there is no index giving content of the digest files--they simply contain all messages posted to the speak-freely list in the order received. Still, everything is there if you're willing to sort through it all to find something of interest.

Only subscribers to speak-freely-digest may retrieve files from the message archive. This restriction is required to prevent E-mail addresses appearing in messages in the archive from being "harvested" by senders of unsolicited commercial E-mail ("spam").