This note  is to inform the  european subscribers of this  list that they
are likely  to experience a  much longer  turnaround time in  the future.
That is, mail originated in the US may now take up to 1 week to reach the
european subscribers, rather than just a  few hours. In fact, long delays
are the  norm for european recipients  of US-based lists; the  reason why
they did not exist on this list up to now is that I selfishly ordered the
corresponding postings  on top of  the multiple-thousand job  queues that
exist in Europe, simply  because I am subscribed to this  list and do not
precisely  like  turnaround times  of  3  days  or more;  besides  which,
ordering  a  couple  dozen postings  a  day  is  not  going to  make  any
difference for the 3000-or-so other  distributions processed every day by
the servers in question.
 
I have since decided that (1) this is a bit unethical, (2) I was spending
too much  time (not  to mention the  terminal I had  to dedicate  to slow
telnet  sessions to  "problem" hosts)  monitoring the  status of  servers
which crash  or go in a  loop 4-5 times  a day on the  average, releasing
held files, fishing orphan files  from the postmaster account and sending
them back, or otherwise  doing the job of other people,  and (3) this may
give EARN  system-programmer types  (who are likely  to subscribe  to the
same lists  as me)  the impression that  the situation is  not as  bad as
their users report it to be.
 
So,  from now  on I  will stop  ordering and  monitoring EARN  queues and
servers. I have moved most of my  subscriptions to a US userid from where
mail is directly forwarded to my SEARN account, and seen that this simple
solution provides even faster delivery time than the tedious baby-sitting
I used to do before.
 
I apologize for the cross-posting, but  I felt it necessary to inform the
subscribers of such "time-critical" lists as LINKFAIL, NODMGT-L or VMXA-L
in order to avoid a sudden  surge of "panic" messages from their european
subscribers.
 
  Eric
 
PS: This  note is  being sent  to all  the affected  high-volume US-based
    distribution  lists  which  have  a  non-negligible  amount  of  EARN
    subscribers; low-volume or  EARN-based lists are not  being warned in
    order to cut down on the cross-posting.