Filtering
It occurs to me that this news probably hasn't been spread as widely as it should've been: there was a while (the first half of October, I think) when sff.net had an outgoing mail filter installed that would silently delete any outgoing message that contained certain keywords. The goal was to stop viruses from being spread via sff.net; a laudable goal, with an extremely flawed implementation. In particular, one of the keywords that sff.net was looking for was honey. That's right: any outgoing message from any sff.net user that contained the word honey was silently discarded. No bounce message, no warning, just thrown away. If the sff.net user in question was sending, say, a submission to SH, they would assume we were considering it, but we would never have seen it. It's impossible to tell how many submissions got lost that way. We've heard from about half a dozen authors with sff.net addresses who submitted during that period but whose submissions we never received; presumably there were others who haven't heard about this problem yet.
So if you have an sff.net email address and you haven't heard back from someone about some mail you sent them a month ago, or if you've been waiting for a month for mail from an sff.net email address, it might be a good idea to check up on it.
Anyway, I think it's an interesting example, in a roundabout sort of way, of what I was talking about in my previous entry: control over communications is control over reality.
Update: Beth just told me that sff.net has in fact removed all of the filters on outgoing mail. (I had previously been under the misimpression that they'd left the system in place but removed the word honey from the keywords list.) I'm glad; I would be very uncomfortable with a system that threw away outgoing email without telling me about it.