On Thu, 21 Jul 1994 17:34:48 EDT, Anthea Tillyer wrote:
>Can auto-delete be turned off in the 1.8a version of LISTSERV?  I certainly
>hope so.
 
I appreciate the sentiment, but maybe you shouldn't be quite so quick to
want to disable this feature.
 
>I have found that almost all error messages are themselves full of
>"erroneous" information about why the message bounced.  For example, some
>users on my list are declared "no such user" just about every summer
>weekend. And I find that almost all the hosts in the UK mysteriously
>become "unknown" on many weekends.  And so on.....I'm sure every list
>owner has the same experience.
 
All true, but whose fault?  It's not LISTSERV's fault that mail daemons
generate incorrect or inappropriate error codes.  It's *possible* for mail
systems to be configured to recognize that hosts may be temporarily
unreachable and name servers don't always respond within defined timeout
parameters.  In fact, coding software to recognize weekends is nearly
trivial.
 
If enough users are inconvenienced and directed to the actual source of the
problem (often their own host's mail system) then pressure will be exerted
to fix the real problems.
 
There still are a (very) few hosts that return error messages to the
internal 'from' address instead of the envelope MAIL FROM (ignoring RFC
1123--the mail standard that's been in place since the late 80's).  Such
misprogrammed and misconfigured mailers used to be common, until their
postmasters got tired of having their daemon'sail sent back to them with
the request that they forward it properly (and fixed or replaced their mail
software).
 
If yo week's Time cover story is worth a glance (yes
it's shallow, but it's not bad for mainstream press).  The assertion is
made that the Internet is growing so fast that it won't be able to sustain
existing ways of doing things.  That prophesy has a lot more chance of
becoming true if sloppy procedures aren't cleaned up.
 
APPLE2-L operates out of BrownVM.  Very few of the auto-deleted subscribers
have either complained or re-subscribed (okay, the Apple 2 isn't a hot item
any more and the list is neither large nor very active, but my experience
is that most of the auto-deletes were caused by legitimate 'unknown user'
returns).
 
/s Murphy A. Sewall <[log in to unmask]> (203) 486-2489 voice
   Professor of Marketing                          (203) 486-5246 fax