On Wed, 15 Feb 1995 11:36:00 EST s.merchant said:
>Obviously, there's the problem of accumulated bounces for list managers.
>But even for personal one-to-one e-mail, many messages that take longer
>than 1 day have often lost their purpose, or at least the recipient would
>like to know that it hasn't been delivered yet.
 
In order of annoyance caused, my list owners seem to hate the "still trying"
messages most, followed by the "I'm giving up after (large integer #) days"
messages.  For list traffic, the "still trying" messages are essentially
useless.  There's nothing more sickening to the manager of a list that
receives lots of bounces than the message "unable to deliver your message for
3 days; will keep trying for 7 days" because it means that a single message
out will probably generate at least 4 more bounces before it finally dies.
 
The real problem, of course, is that the bounce message scheme was designed
for person-to-person mail, not mailing list mail.
 
>around it :-)) LISTSERV could detect bounces for messages for members
>who have been deleted, and simply ignore them.  This feature could be
>turned on and off for each list owner, and perhaps even be programmable
>for the number of days.
 
Yes!  More generally:  "for email addresses which are not subscribed." Eric
will say that maintaining the list of recently deleted subscribers is a
problem which the solution cannot be tuned, since it depends on the largest
number of days a message is kept before a bounce is sent.
 
Dennis Boone
MSU Listserv Postmaster