The horror of losing access to your email

Shenzhen Skyline

There are a few free and trialware VPN services (such as Psiphon and LanternPro) that come handy when you travel in countries with censorship. I had a hard time recently with Google locking my account due to suspicious activity (logging in from a random location via VPN). It was not letting me in since I could not remember the answer to my security questions and I did not have my phone working with me as I was traveling. Eventually, I restored the access to my account. However, it was quite a scary experience given how much I rely on my email account.

GSoC Regional Groups

This is the time of new students in GSoC. There have been some interests and discussions around GSoC regional groups in the GSoC mailing list.

The regional groups serve a purpose. They discuss country-specific issues, such as issue/delays in receiving the packages in certain countries, taxation in India, local meetups in different countries or regions, or discussions in your local languages (for example, discussions in Chinese in wechat China group).Many countries have their own group. If your country had little to no participation in the past, there is a possibility to have groups covering a larger regions. For example, the group for Africa: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/gsoc-africa

You will need to do a Google search to find your local groups.

I understand some emails may be uninteresting for the audience. But pls avoid sending an email saying "can we pls stop this discussion? It is annoying to me" First you are contributing to the noise by such an email. Second, usually it comes across rude. So avoid sending them unless you are one of the moderators.

A worse case I noticed was an email I noticed asking to stop the discussions on what IM to use. The sender decided to create a separate email thread to express his point. Usually the emails are organized nicely into threads. Avoid creating new threads to express your opinion. Use the same thread. That will avoid too much distraction. If someone is not interested in that particular topic, they may ignore or mute the topic.

Feel free to join or ignore any country or regional GSoC groups. They were typically created by past-students like us. You are not obliged to join them, though they are usually very welcoming to their local students (and are more tolerant to noise).

If you are from Sri Lanka, feel free to join the Google Sri Lanka Google group. It seems to be very passive in recent years though. 

I believe there is a separate Google group managed by GSoC admins to announce the meetups formally to the GSoC admins and others - google-soc-meetups@googlegroups.com I did not see much activity in that group.

Good luck with your GSoC and related meetups.
 

Set your Vacation responder OFF

Gladly opened the reply I got for the mailing list to check whether I got what I needed. "Out of office from 19  of March until 5 of April 2010. Back on April, 6th.", someone's vacation responder has mailed me. Too sad to see these vacation responders not being smart enough to differentiate the personal mails from the mails received from the mailing lists. Without knowing what he does, that man is spamming each and everyone one who is sending a mail to the mailing list.

Another annoyance is 'unsubscribe' mail flood. If you want to unsubscribe from a mailing list, mostly you should send a mail to -user-request@ or -dev-request with the word unsubscribe in the message body, or a blank message to -user-unsubscribe@ or -dev-unsubscribe@ depending on the particular list's settings. NOT a mail with the body and/or header 'unsubscribe' to the user/dev list itself. This piece of information is mostly provided as a footer with each mail, still people continue making the same mistake.