VRF

The VRF mailing list was started for the VEE community in early 1995 and is designed as an open forum for discussing issues relative to VEE. Though not moderated, VRF has maintained remarkably high signal-to-noise with only a rare occasional off-topic message. Please respect this and keep other topics in other forums. Since the premier VEE users in the world follow VRF, you can usually expect to get replies quickly.

UPDATE: December 2024 - apparently not actually shut down, and no activity in a long time, but VRF still functions.

RIP: MAY 2024- Keysight has announced shut down of VRF (again). This time appears to be permanent.

UPDATE: APRIL 2022- VRF is back up and running

JANUARY 2022: Keysight has shut down VRF. If you would like to contact some of the major VEE users for support issues, feel free to write to vrf@veeos.org

The official word from Keysight as of October 2015:

Vrf And Vrf-Digest Instructions

* The VEE email reflector (vrf) is an electronic "user group" that allows VEE users to trade email with each other. Each user can send an email message to a central
address and have it resent to everyone on the list.

You can subscribe to the list by sending an email request to the address:

vrf-request@general.lists.keysight.com

Leave the email subject blank and include the word "subscribe" in the message body (no long signatures and plain text only).

Once you are subscribed, then you can send email to the address:

vrf@general.lists.keysight.com

Messages sent to this address will be reflected to all addresses [sic]ubscribed to vrf. Do not send messages to subscribe or unsubscribe to this address.

You can unsubscribe to the list (both regular and digest) by sending email to the address (no long signature and plain text only):

leave-vrf-list@general.lists.keysight.com

You can also unsubscribe by following the instructions in the footer of each message you receive from vrf.

A digest of vrf correspondence is also available, where the correspondence is accumulated daily, and is then sent out.

You subscribe to the digest by sending a message to:

lyris@general.lists.keysight.com

The message body must be:

set vrf mimedigest

You can return to receiving each message as they are posted by sending a message to:

lyris@general.lists.keysight.com

The message body must be:

set vrf mail

If you are subscribed to vrf and are not receiving emails make sure that you do not have a junk filter turned on. We have found that the junk filter in Hotmail(R) discards
messages from the vrf.

Please keep your messages short, and if you absolutely must enclose a VEE [sic]rogram please make sure it is very small so as to not clutter people's mailboxes.

Attachments

Over the years VRF has generated many attachments. These can be found in the VRF Archive (assuming that it is working someday) but are also available in raw format in the attachment archive.

Hints

Years of experience has shown that VRF sometimes has issues. Here are a few hints that may be helpful.

No traffic for a couple of weeks or more means there's likely a problem. Even though traffic in VRF is much lower than in previous years, it is still unusual for weeks to go by without at least some message. After a month or so there's good reason to look at a test message - send to VRF and see if it gets through. Please be sure to label as a test.
Some mail/users get filtered. Given the long email paths and the plethora of filters in place both inside Keysight and at user's workplaces/ISP's there are times when individuals get effectively blacklisted. If you see normal VRF traffic but your own messages go nowhere, then first check to make sure that you are using the correct email address. One way to be really sure is to REPLY TO ALL to one of the VRF messages, sending note to both VRF and the OP. If OP gets your reply yet is does not show up in VRF then you know there's a problem. Check your email for bounces. If you appear to have this problem then a note to VRF admin or even VEE support is in order.
Attachments can get lost. The most common problem is attachments that get lost to spam filters. ZIP files are often "filtered" so try renaming to something else. If all else fails embed a binary attachment inside your email using UUENCODE or VEE container format or the like. If your VEE program is getting stripped send source as plain text inside your message.
Plain ASCII text can be your friend. Since ASCII is extremely unlikely to contain active malware it is very rarely "filtered". Hence if you want something to really get through email in general and VRF in specific, turn off MIME, HTML, long signatures, etc. and send in plain unwrapped text.
It can be hard to subscribe or unsubscribe. If you have trouble getting on or off the list, perhaps the best way to proceed is a note to the VRF admin (owner-vrf@general.lists.keysight.com ) or VEE support ( vee_support@keysight.com ).

History

Since inception there have been more than 40k posts, with about 1/4 of those from the 10 top authors.

Year # Posts
1995     25   VEE 3 released
1996    546
1997   1200
1998   1949
1999   1820
2000   1310   VEE 6 released
2001   1762                   << Agilent era starts
2002   2612
2003   3008
2004   4454   VEE 7 released   << Peak activity
2005   3178
2006   2582
2007   2562   VEE 8 released
2008   2326   VEE 9 released
2009   2387
2010   1874   VEE 9.2 (Win7 support)
2011   2149   VEE 9.3
2012   1173
2013    925   VEE 9.32 (Win8 support)
2014    734                    << Keysight era starts
2015    853
2016    562
2017    315
2018    491   VEE 9.33 (Win10 support) is final release
2019    370
2020    314
2021    216
2022    127
2023    110
2024     74  VRF shuts down May 1
         NOTE: 9 more messages made in through up until 21DEC. After that test messages
               evaporated so presumably VRF is indeed defunct
total 41824


Top Authors    # posts as of MAY 2024
Stan Bischof     2960
Shawn Fessenden  2338  tech wizard
Bill Drago       1765  power user
Detlef Baranski  1357  power user
Greg Goebel       781  VEE mktg
Les Hammer        499
Gregg Levine      440
Mike Groves       432
Bill Ossmann      363
Scott Bayes       319  VEE team
Barrie Walden     316
Richard Walker    226
Bruce Wenner      222