--- "Mail deffered". - Torino, 1996-01-09
 
Correct me: as I understand it, "if his account is truly defunct"
[Philip Janus, LSTOWN-L, 1996-01-09] the message should not be a warning
for pending delivery (or for final dequeueing after many trials) but a
5xx message, which LISTSERV auto-deletion mechanism can act upon
(deleting or summarizing).
 
Otherwise, warnings are reflected to the ERRORS-TO address: and for a
high traffic list is certainly wise to point it to a secondary one,
devoted to this duty: eventually to discard everything unread. On some
mail systems (and for high traffic a smart one is probably a
convenience) incoming mail can be orderly and automatically sorted, at
least by the contents of FROM and SUBJECT: and LISTSERV provides
reliable information there. A script could even be applied to flush well
known situations (scanning for addresses in the text); I don't recommend
it, being easy to over-discard: if you have many users, it happens that
a single message notifies about pending delivery for a bunch of them,
not necessarily all at the same address.
 
Accepting perhaps a little of postmaster's (more than listowner's) duty,
I consider this more a service than an annoyance, since sometimes
LISTSERV offers this way useful documentation, for spotting out and
addressing e-mail misfunctionings of which users may be otherwise
completely unaware.
 
I miei saluti.
 
<-- Eugenio Gatto    (CIDEM, Politecnico di Torino, Italia)
                     (list owner [log in to unmask])
    TEL 39.11.564'6600 FACS 39.11.564'6609 EM [log in to unmask]