Sun, 11 Nov 1990 20:34:58 +0100
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This note is to inform the european subscribers of this list that they
are likely to experience a much longer turnaround time in the future.
That is, mail originated in the US may now take up to 1 week to reach the
european subscribers, rather than just a few hours. In fact, long delays
are the norm for european recipients of US-based lists; the reason why
they did not exist on this list up to now is that I selfishly ordered the
corresponding postings on top of the multiple-thousand job queues that
exist in Europe, simply because I am subscribed to this list and do not
precisely like turnaround times of 3 days or more; besides which,
ordering a couple dozen postings a day is not going to make any
difference for the 3000-or-so other distributions processed every day by
the servers in question.
I have since decided that (1) this is a bit unethical, (2) I was spending
too much time (not to mention the terminal I had to dedicate to slow
telnet sessions to "problem" hosts) monitoring the status of servers
which crash or go in a loop 4-5 times a day on the average, releasing
held files, fishing orphan files from the postmaster account and sending
them back, or otherwise doing the job of other people, and (3) this may
give EARN system-programmer types (who are likely to subscribe to the
same lists as me) the impression that the situation is not as bad as
their users report it to be.
So, from now on I will stop ordering and monitoring EARN queues and
servers. I have moved most of my subscriptions to a US userid from where
mail is directly forwarded to my SEARN account, and seen that this simple
solution provides even faster delivery time than the tedious baby-sitting
I used to do before.
I apologize for the cross-posting, but I felt it necessary to inform the
subscribers of such "time-critical" lists as LINKFAIL, NODMGT-L or VMXA-L
in order to avoid a sudden surge of "panic" messages from their european
subscribers.
Eric
PS: This note is being sent to all the affected high-volume US-based
distribution lists which have a non-negligible amount of EARN
subscribers; low-volume or EARN-based lists are not being warned in
order to cut down on the cross-posting.
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