Early Valiant Barracuda Club

Join the Early Valiant and Barracuda Club mailing list and meet some of the 200 +/- other helpful people who also enjoy these old cars. (You needn't be a formal club member, but we'd love it if you were.) Average traffic varies from a few messages to a couple dozen messages per day.

The concept is easy: You send one email to the list, and every subscriber receives a copy. The catch: you need to be a subscriber first.

How to subscribe: Everything is automated. In a very small nutshell, here's the process:

Step 1: someone (probably you) sends MajorDomo a Subscription Request.
Step 2: MajorDomo acknowledges, asks user for authorization.
Step 3: user returns his/her authorization...
Step 4: MajorDomo sends a welcome message.

(#2-3 are simply part of a check-and-balance system to make sure no one else subscribes you without your knowledge or consent.) You can perform Step 1 yourself, or someone can do it for you. In order to initiate Step 1, send a letter to MajorDomo@earlycuda.org with the following contents in the BODY of the letter, substituting your own email address:

subscribe evbc-list YourEmail@wherever

Or, if you're sending from the email account where you'd like your subscription to be sent, you can omit your email address, since MajorDomo will look at the header to see where you sent it from. The syntax would then become simply

subscribe evbc-list

(If you're using Outlook or several other mailing clients, we've made the first part of the job easy. Click HERE to have an email created with the appropriate portions already filled in.)

Problems?

Steps 2 and 3 have proven troublesome for some users who view their mail on the Web, particularly at Yahoo. Click HERE for a more detailed description of how to handle it.

What if I want to Unsubscribe?

You may have already guessed this... send another note to MajorDomo@earlycuda.org. For your convenience, instructions on how to unsubscribe will be included at the bottom of every message.

One final point: use the MajorDomo@earlycuda address for concerns with your subscription. For posting to the list, do not send to MajorDomo, send to the list instead.

When using the list:

"Reply" will send to just the individual who posted.
"Reply to All" sends to the entire list, AND to the individual.

You could choose to provide much nicer traffic management if, in your responses, you remember to delete extra names in the "To:" field, unless you have an earthshattering reason why you want to make sure the individual gets two responses.

Yes, we could have set up the "Reply" differently, but we chose to conform to the standard being used by the biggest Chrysler car club mailing list in existence, the MML. By the way, if you're not familiar with it, or not familiar with mailing lists in general, they have a lengthy but wonderful Etiquette page of their own. Much of their ideas are equally valid here: please don't send chain letters, virus warnings, and so on.

Messages have lots of extra garbage in them...

Again, you can help. When you reply to a post, please trim out everything from the previous post except what is necessary to keep the thread of conversation clear.

Do we have archives available? How about digests?

Not at this time, sorry. Building a reliable email transmission system was the top priority.

Help! I can't send my picture!

There is a size limit-- message size and photo size together cannot be more than about 75KB. This is to keep email sizes reasonable, especially for those people on modems. And to be honest, there is no reason your picture cannot tell a story in 30KB or less, if you size it accordingly. Unfortunately, today's 4- and 5-megapixel cameras do not produce small images, so you'll have to use image manipulation software to condense them. (If you try to send something too big, your message will not get through. But you won't get an error, either. I'm working on that problem.)

Here are some general guidelines: since most people have a screen about 800 pixels wide, some of which is used up by the overhead of the Web browser window, your picture can easily be only 5-600 pixels wide and look like it's filling a large portion of the screen. (In fact, most of the photos elsewhere on this Web site are less than 3-400 pixels wide and are still quite viewable.) Use image manipulation software to make your picture as small (pixel size) as you reasonably can. Then use the highest JPG compression (sometimes called "lowest quality") that will still render the result usable, when you save the file. You'll be surprised how small you can make those files.

I can't figure out my camera software enough to do that!

Yea, I know. Neither can lots of other people. Stay tuned... Over at my day job at Stretched Out Software, we've designed a very simple image sizing program, due to be released soon. That's all it does, scale the image and set the JPG compression. Because for most people, that's all they need. I'll update this page when it's ready. - Erik