The number of error reports is largely dependent on your willingness
to deal with them as soon as they show up.  Just deleting them is
a terrible strategy because in many cases it simply means that you
will get more and more and more of the same, especially if yours
is a fairly active list.  A few days ago I could not access my
mail for several hours and was consequently unable to set an
individual to digest until some 30 messages had already been
rejected by a system that loves to send daily reports of its
delivery attempts.  I am still receiving 30 messages a day from
that provider, informing me that these old messages have not
yet been delivered.  Some systems keep this nonsense up for
weeks!  Today I woke up to over a hundred error messages because
several providers are apparently down.  I've been setting
a whole flock of subscribers to digest.  My subscribers know
that they can set themselves back to ordinary mail as soon as
they receive their first unexpected digest--which means that their
system is accepting mail again.  Be sure to do all setting to
nomail or digest in the quiet mode; otherwise the notification
listserv sends to the subscriber of the change you made will
generate yet one more error message.  Keep in mind, that once
you have dealt with a particular subscriber's problem, it is
then quite safe to delete the remainder of error messages to
that same subscriber.  I tend to keep one, just in case a
subscriber get upset because I set him or her to digest. The
error message is my justification for the change.
 
BTW, has anyone else experienced problems with ix.netcom.com
today?  I just received several errors from there.  Plus
demon.com.uk (a system that produces an incredible number
of errors) . . .
 
Ingrid Shafer
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