Topic: Junk mail postings of conference announcements to network lists.
 
Fellow LOwners,
 
The members of my list are from a small community of specialists, plus a
few others who like to "look in". The list also caters for "parallel
processing" in a larger sense because all the specialists share this interest.
However, this broad inclusion has resulted in an inordinate number of postings
to the list from conference organisers mass-mailing all lists which have any
relation to their conference. These postings are usually huge in comparison to
the handful of messages that appear on my list (200 lines verses 5..10 lines).
 
I usually edit such postings (it's a moderated list) to reduce the volume of
such traffic because most consider it junk mail. A huge invitation to an
afternoon talk somewhere in Kansas is of little interest to a group formed
mostly from Europeans.
 
Question: Have other owners noticed a general increase in the number of large
conference announcements? If so, how do you handle them? I used to archive them
and post a very brief message saying that details could be had through listserv
but only two members ever bothered! So I gave up...
 
Question: Can archived files be given an expiry date? That way I could write a
small prog to archive conf messages and set the expiry appropriately.
 
--- Rotan Hanrahan (Para-DAP)