This page provides guidance about how TNTalk works, and what you can do with it
How TNTalk Works
At its heart TNTalk is a number of Mailing-Lists. A mailing-list automatically forwards every email that a subscriber sends to it to all other subscribers to that list. Although the technology that underpins mailing-lists is quite old by today’s standards, its great advantage for Visually Impaired users is that it works well with assistive technology such as screen readers.
Mailing-lists don’t provide any features that organise the list or impose any structure, apart from the message subject that a subscriber uses when they send a message to the list or reply to a message. If you’d like to organise the mailing-list emails that you receive, you’ll need to use your own email program (using for example Microsoft Outlook’s “Rules” feature) to do this.
TNTalk’s mailing-lists are built using the popular GNU Mailman web application. Mailman is free software, developed and distributed under a GNU Open Source license. It’s been used widely for over 20 years, and during this time has proven to be extremely reliable.
Options for Subscribers
Here are a few terms that describe some of the options available to subscribers to TNTalk:
- Digest – this option compiles all the emails sent to the list on a single day into a single longer email. This is useful if you’re finding that the number of emails you receive from the list is becoming a nuisance;
- Suspend – activating this option stops the list from sending any emails to you, but preserves your current subscription. You can re-activate delivery of emails from the list easily. This feature may help if for example you go on holiday and don’t want to receive list emails while you’re away;
- Unsubscribe – this completely terminates your subscription to TNTalk. If you decide later that you’d like to subscribe again, you’ll need to re-apply to the List Moderator.