E-mailinglist

To discuss Edgar Reitz' films, share your experiences with others, or contribute things to the website, you can join the heimat123-list (previously known as the DZH-list).

Once you've joined the list you can also send contributions yourself. Go to the Mailman pages to subscribe or unsubscribe. As a member, you have access to the archives. There are currently discussions in three languages: English, German and Dutch:

• heimat123 for the English discussion
• heimat123-de for the German discussion
• heimat123-nl for the Dutch discussion

When you change your e-mail address and you want to continue receiving the Heimat mailinglist postings, you should unsubscribe from your old address and subscribe with the new address. If you forget to unsubscribe I will one day manually unsubscribe the address that will send back errors, but I really appreciate it if you do it yourself.

Remember that when you have questions about the list itself not to ask that on the list but to the operator at reinder@rustema.nl.

Archive of the discussion

Is there any archive you might want to ask? No, there is not one that is publicly available. You should make your own archive in your mailreader after you have subscribed. The filter options of your mailreader are really helpful for that purpose, every subject-line contains the word heimat:.

The reason why there is no archive is threefold:

1. prevent SPAM;
2. protect privacy;
3. improve the quality.

1. First of all to avoid SPAM, unsollicited e-mail. If it's on the web, your address might be collected (automatically) by third parties who could start sending irrelevant e-mail with commercial messages to the list.
   
2. Secondly, the e-mail addresses of the contributors are made public on the web. Some people might not like the idea that after they have made a posting to the mailinglist their e-mail address is archived on the web for years to come. Others can use search engines to combine your name with your e-mail address and start e-mailing without your explicit consent.
   
3. Thirdly, the most important reason is that when a webforum is easily accessible to anyone who passes by, it is usually an invitation not to write very careful well thought out postings. Many webforums therefore evolve in superficial chatboxes. E-mail on the other hand tends to be more carefully formulated since it arrives in the privacy of your own mailbox. It is treated with more respect and sometimes sheer elaborated writer's craftmanship. Now, when interesting topics are discussed or news items exchanged, I copy them from the list to the appropriate section in this website. You can say that the mailinglist is the input for the website. Unlike a webforum where you have to wade through many individual postings before you read what you are after, the postings are summarised and carefully edited before added to the site. So when you are not subscribed to the discussion, then check the website periodically to see if anything changed and you won't miss much.

An objection to this approach is that some of you agree with these three considerations entirely but eventually unsubscribe after they found their mailbox flooded with e-mail after a lively discussion emerged. In that case you might want to consider opening a special free mailbox especially for your subscriptions to mailinglists like these. Make sure to also include your normal low-volume, critical private e-mailaddress in the signature of that one so that readers of your postings can reach you directly without waiting days or weeks before you find the time to check the e-mail of that extra mailaddress. For the technically inclined the filter options in a good mailreader as mentioned above should be sufficient while sticking to one single all purpose e-mail address.

Having said all this, you can also download an archive of old postings which you can import as a mailbox in your e-mailreader. It's in a unix-text format so it should work in mailreaders like Eudora.