The Water Advocates has ceased sponsoring and hosting the Forum

This letter to forum users says why

January 30, 2023

Dear forum users,

I prepared the original text of this message for distribution to forum subscribers.  My email was sent about 4:pm today.

We learned recently that the unmoderated Water Advocates forum, and the fact that we have not been actively managing the forum subscribers email list, has caused the Water Advocates to be flagged by Gmail and other major email service providers, as a bulk spammer.

As a consequence of our hands-off hosting, many of our 117 forum subscribers have blocked emails from our domain, rather than unsubscribe.  The act of blocking reports that email as spam.  Every email sent to a blocked address generates another count against our reputation as an emailer.  Every time a forum subscriber replies to a post, more emails to subscribers that have blocked us are sent.  The cumulative effect is very bad.

The Water Advocates executive committee decided today to discontinue the forum, effective immediately.

Current forum users are free to set up their own discussion group using Google Groups, for example.  The Water Advocates will consider a moderated forum in the future, but we don't have the current capacity to host a moderated forum and adding one is not a priority.

Sincerely,

Norm Gaume
President