On Tue, 19 Jul 1994 16:40:07 -0700 Anita Cohen-Williams said:
 
>    Someone on my list has sent out a newsletter that they created to the
>entire list. While our list is not the busiest (as of yet),...............
 
But it will be! For what it's worth, I can relate the experience with my
lists.  Our policy on long posts and unsolicted mega-posts is one of the
more successful aspects of my lists.
Since we are for teachers of English to foreigners, we have a lot of members
in countries with poor connectivity and members who have very small email
boxes.  Therefore, it seemed from the beginning unfair to use the list for
sending out unsolicited long mailings.  (It's also inefficient, but that's
another issue). This consideration made us come up with a policy on this
issue 'way before the list traffic was too large to accommodate large posts.
 
This is what we do:
We often remind members to send long posts to the owners for archiving. Or we
suggest that they ANNOUNCE on the list that they have the file and will send it
to anyone who wants.  We have always tried to make it clear that the basis for
the policy is consideration for colleagues, not just bloody-mindedness.
Then, to take care of the people who pay no attention to mail from listowners
anyway, we have a low sizelim=     in the header, so LISTSERV screens out long
posts. The long posting is then rejected and the person is informed why. The
owner gets the file as an error and can then decide whether to archive it, junk
it, or suggest an edited version.
 
I really recommend the sizelim= option.  It has helped us enormously,
especially now that our lists have grown into thousands of members. In fact,
our current sizelim= setting is - gasp!- 65 lines (and that includes headers!).
The result is that most of our postings are now pithy and to the point. Even
the jokes are shorter! This wouldn't necessarily be true for every kind of
list on every kind of topic, of course, but it's great for English teachers!
 
Good luck!
 
Peace,
Anthea Tillyer
City University of New York