On Fri, 7 Jun 91 09:03:20 CDT Landy Manderson said:
>On Thu, 6 Jun 91 14:43:00 CDT Phil Endacott said:
>>
>>Seems to me that it would be simpler to do an "automagic purge" every
>>six months or 4 months and then send some boilerplate advising the
>>subscriber that the list is being updated and if he/she wishes to
>>continue receiving mail, to SUB again.
 
 This option is available in Listserv now with the RENEWAL list keyword.
 keyword I've never setup a list that way so I can't tell you exactly
 how it works.  However one of the lists I co-own has a ListEarn peer
 that was changed as some point to make use of this facility.  Plus it's
 documented somewhere, try the LSTSRV-L archives if you like...  I'm
 certain an announcement was made when the feature was added.
 
>1. Increased network traffic from all the cancellation, subscription, and
>   confirmation messages.
 
 I don't think the amount of traffice generated is a problem.  In fact,
 I'd argue that just one case of an e-mail address going over disk quota,
 while the owner was on sabatical, generates more useless traffic than
 the RENEWAL code ever would.  And if that e-mail address was behind a
 gateway that queues files for 28 days, sends out "I can't deliver this
 mail, I'll try again later" messages and the whole mess starts on a
 Friday afternoon, an significant amount of useless mail can/will be
 generated.  If sending out "please confirm your sub" notes avoids
 even one such scenario, it's well worth the traffic.
 
>2. Potential loss of interesting messages from our lists in the period of
>   time between unsubscription and resubscription.
 
 If I understand my CC:'d copies of the notes sent to people from EB0UB011,
 people are given a warning before the automatic removal.  So, if the
 confirmations are sent back in a reasonable amount of time, then no
 interrupion of service will occurr.  Again, other factors are more likely
 to result in mail being lost.  For example, several people on several
 lists at JHUVM missed about a week's worth of mail when the regional
 InterBit gateway couldn't reach Australia.  And they didn't have the
 luxury of a note warning them that they had been removed from the list.
 They just stopped receiving mail.
 
 -jj