At 12:21 AM 1996/06/01 +0100, E.R.Kooi wrote:
> I am investigating the effect of limiting the number of messages a list
>is allowed to forward on a day, because the list members are complaining
>about too many messages each day, sometimes over a hundred.
 
Bill Gruber has answered some of your technical questions about the way the
daily limit works.  Let me add a different perspective.
 
The purpose of the daily limit is primarily to serve as the final protection
against infinite loops.  If mail is stuck in a loop and is getting sent out
over and over again, it will be stopped at the daily limit.  It was not
intended as a way to cut down on the volume of a list that is more active
than some of the members want.
 
It can be used to cut off peaks.  For instance, we have a list on which the
message volume varies considerably from day to day.  When this list reaches
its daily limit (of 200), we wait until the next day to free the list.  We
rarely have peak days twice in a row, so the list will get caught up the
next day.  This procedure serves only to reduce the peaks by delaying some
messages to the next day; it does nothing to reduce the overall volume of
the list.  This is not a list for discussion, so the delay does not impede
the exchange of ideas.
 
I would think that trying to reduce the overall volume of messages by
introducing delays in the appearance of messages would not be effective.  If
you are getting 75 messages per day and you want the list volume to be 50,
you will defer 25 messages each day.  In 10 days, the backlog will be 250
messages.  A new message will not appear for five days.  People will soon
realize this and the volume will drop until it reaches a steady state with a
relatively constant backlog.  But the delays will change the nature of the
discussion dramatically--in ways that are hard to predict. I suspect that
you will get a lot of repetitive messages--because people can't see that
there are messages in the queue that say essentially the same thing.  If I
did not know what Bill Gruber had said, I would repeat the points he made.
 
There are other ways of reducing volume.  One possibility is to split the
list and the other is to use topics so that people can select a subset of
the messages to receive.
 
Good luck.
 
 
                               Peace,  Dan
 
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