On Wed, 14 Dec 1994 19:11:45 -0600 Winship said:
>On Tue, 13 Dec 1994, James A. Schaefer wrote:
>       text deleted
>>
>> When I send the set nomail's and deletes, is there anyway to insert comments
>> in the file so I could preserve a brief note of why I did what I did, e.g.,
>> set travel-L nomail for [log in to unmask]
>> *  joe ran out of disk space
>> delete travel-L [log in to unmask]
>> *  mary is an unknown user
>
>I don't know of any.  What we do is have a separate account to which
>errors are sent.  We keep one sample of each error on which action is
>taken in DELETED NOTEBOOK, including autodeletes.  We keep 'em for around
>for about a month or so, so if an irate subscriber asks we can just
>check the file for the reason for the deletion.  And send a copy for
>their computer people if they insist the problem couldn't be on their
>end.
>
>Douglas
>        Douglas Winship    Austin, Texas    [log in to unmask]
>                    Secondary AUTOCAT Listowner
 
Douglas got ahead of me in describing our practice with AUTOCAT in
response to James L. Schaefer's message.   In addition to maintaining
the DELETED NOTEBOOK I also maintain a POSTMASTER NOTEBOOK where I keep
copies of messages sent to various postmasters asking them to help
resolve problems with accounts from their sites.  One other step that
 
There is one other step that I find very useful.  At the beginning of
each month I do a REVIEW BY COUNTRY and a REVIEW BY NAMES and print the
output.   I keep a copy of the current and previous months beside my PC
and every time a user is Auto-Deleted and every time I Delete a
subscription or set it to Nomail, I annotate the COUNTRY printout
to show the action taken, date of action, and reason for action.  I also
indicate if I have notified the Postmaster at the affected site.  (The
NAMES printout is primarily for Reference purposes to be used when
I have a subscriber name and an unclear address though now that I
have learned about SCAN this list is of less importance).
 
This annotated printed list of subscribers is very helpful when I get
the kinds of questions that James Schaefer referred to since the
questions usually come to one of my two personal accounts and the
DELETED NOTEBOOK is maintained on the 3d account set up solely to
receive errors.   I can tell at a glance what happened and then, if
necessary, go into the errors account and quickly find the error
message involved since the annotation has told me the date of the
action taken.
 
Judith Hopkins, Listowner of [log in to unmask]
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