On Fri, 29 Jan 1993 09:51:29 EST Nick Laflamme <NLAFLAMM@IRISHVMA> said:
 
>Can someone  refresh my memory  on how LISTSERV bunches  recipients into
>notes going  to MAILER and then  onto the rest  of the world? I  know it
>tries  to bundle  as many  users as  it can  into the  same note,  but I
>thought under  some conditions it  limited the number of  recipients per
>note to  five, sending  multiple copies of  a note to  the same  node if
>necessary rather than sending to more than five users at a time.
 
I have decided to change this in  the next release to never put more than
one address  in the 'To:' field  because it generates just  too much user
confusion and questions to me.
 
>Right  now,  IRISHVMA  has  a  couple of  local  lists  with  about  100
>recipients on  nd.edu. It  looks like  it's trying  to pump  through one
>message  to nd.edu  listing all  100  recipients, and  for some  reason,
>(X)MAILER 2.10 is choking after 92 or so recipients consistently.
 
Install LMail or go back to R2.08 until John fixes XMAILER.
 
1.  Whenever the  LRECL  is  greater than  253,  R2.10 generates  invalid
   Netdata headers. SMTP can't read them  and calls the fire brigade. The
   message is  lost until you  go to the  pain of somehow  extracting the
   text out of the raw Netdata stuff.
 
2. R2.10 crashes whenever SMTP sends it a file with LRECL > about 1000.
 
3. The Netdata  files generates by XMAILER are actually  invalid and will
   be rejected by  MVS sites. VM doesn't  use the record in  error at all
   and thus RECEIVE will work fine. XMAILER  itself runs on a loop of 256
   "get count update pointer"  iterations over uninitialized storage when
   processing such  files, generally  with no  harm done  but there  is a
   potential for having an infinite loop.
 
I'll spare you the list of all  the other minor bugs. People report these
to *me* with the  hope that I will be able to talk  John into fixing them
faster. Let me take the opportunity to collectively answer these sorts of
reports. First, I do appreciate being kept informed of these problems, as
it can save  me time when receiving bug reports  about LISTSERV which are
in fact due to  XMAILER. However, John might well have  a good reason for
not having  fixed these  problems yet:  like me, he  has a  full-time job
which is not  dedicated to XMAILER. Unless John has  said that he doesn't
want to fix this or that bug because he thinks it is unimportant, I don't
see any reason for me to get involved into his business. Furthermore, the
last time  I tried to  talk John into doing  anything was after  1.7b was
released and  I wanted my mod  for owner-* incorporated. It  took about a
year to happen,  so I'm the wrong  person to try to put  pressure on John
anyway :-) Finally,  one of the main  reasons I wrote LMail  was to avoid
just this  sort of  situation. I understand  that installing  R2.10 takes
less time  than migrating to  LMail, but  that doesn't change  my general
recommendation of investing a few hours investigating LMail, showing what
it can do to your user support  folks, and letting them make the decision
with the understanding that *they*  will be responsible for informing the
users and so on :-)
 
  Eric