While this preventive maintenance is a good idea for sites which have a
lot of lists, I am afraid that, generally speaking, netwide signoff and
the like do not have much of a future. This mechanism was implemented as
a short term solution to a problem for which, unfortunately, the
"network" did not provide any long term solution. Picture the situation.
You are the manager of a real estate company who owns a number of villas
and rents them to people. Joe just left the "Blue Nightingale" and you
are going to rent it to someone else. Unfortunately it seems Joe was
subscribed to a number of magazines that might, er, have a negative PR
effect on the next prospective customer to visit the house. Do you:
1. Pick up the magazines as they come in and tell their publishers that
Joe no longer lives here?
2. Tell the post office to block all incoming mail for Joe?
3. Look up the names of all the publishers in the country and mail them a
letter saying that, in case Joe was subscribed to any of their
publications, it would be nice if they could stop sending them to this
address?
Let's face it, what we are doing makes no sense at all. The reason we had
to do that is that choice 1 was not practical, just like in real life,
while choice 2 didn't work, because the post offices in the various
villages couldn't agree on the language in which to notify the sender
that Joe no longer lives at the "Blue Nightingale". 3 was an emergency
solution, and we had hoped that the post office would get their act
together. Unfortunately they haven't, but as the network grows, the
number of lists grows, the number of subscribers grows and the machines
don't grow because they run politically incorrect operating systems, we
will have to stop doing that some day, meaning we will be back to choice
1.
Regarding deleted nodes, however, the problem will be solved in the next
version of LISTSERV (or with development fix 17E-002D) for servers whose
local mailer is LMail. LISTSERV can understand the delivery errors
generated by LMail and will delete the old addresses the first time it
attempts to post to them. This does not of course solve the problem of
deleted accounts, as the target mailer is then the one generating the
error, but at least one of the problems is solved.
Eric
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