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 [log in to unmask]