Patrick <[log in to unmask]> says:
>  You know, at first I thought this new "auto-delete" feature was going to
>be a big help.  After months of dealing with the fallout from it, though, I
 ...
>is cleared up the next day, but then I have to either let everyone know or
>quietly add everyone back on.
 ...
>Opinions will differ, I'm sure, but from here it looks like "auto-delete"
>is one of those "improvements" that must have looked good on paper but turns
>out to be a pain in the neck in practice.
 
I disabled auto-deleted on my lists some time ago for similar reasons.
I was thinking of setting it back on (it *is* a nice feature in principle
if it can be made more robust to the lack of robustness to the network
around it), but the above narration served as a painful reminder of why
I disabled mine to start with.
 
I'd suggest that Auto-delete be enhanced to have a "number of days"
parameter that essentially would do a "leaky-bucket" filtering on the
bounced messages.  Something along the lines of "if this happens n
consecutive days during which there was at least 1 message sent to the
list then auto-delete."  That's what I do now manually with n=2; 90% of
transients don't last more than a day, and if they do I'm usually
inclined to delete the offending addresses anyway so I don't have to
deal with the bounced mail.  (n=1 would be equivalent to the current
aggressive behaviour.)
 
To the oft-stated argument: "It's a problem with the outside
world--why should Listserv have to have this kludge in it to
compensate?"  I would respond that (a) fixing the outside world is about
a million times (999,999.623 for Pentium users) more difficult than
having listserv handle it and (b) it's all relative anyway--if the
outside world were perfect and people properly signed-off their lists
before their accounts went away, we wouldn't need auto-delete anyway.
 
Basically, what I'm saying is that 90% of the work to implement
auto-delete has been done, and it's 30% useful.  Another 10% work would
make it 99% useful.  Seems like a good investment.
 
>But today was the last straw--when I discovered that listserv had two days
>ago auto-deleted ME from my own lists!  What's more, it didn't let me, as
>Patrick Leary
>[log in to unmask]
 
Oh yes, I had two ...indiana.edu that would have disappeared too--it was
only the existence of two simultaneously and it being not quite
end-of-semester that made me suspicious.  (But that glitch didn't even
last a day, and would definitely have been filtered out with a 2-day
criterion.)
 
Shahrukh Merchant
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