> This as you know is highly controversial as it requires every message to > be customized specifically for its recipient. Other than wasting > bandwidth, this significantly increases the amount of resources needed to > process the message at the RECEIVING site. To give just one example, > L-Soft delivers some 1-1.5M messages to AOL every day. While WE have the > resources to customize each of these messages and send them as 1-1.5M > separate transactions, I'm not sure AOL would be thrilled if we (and > everyone else in the net) did that. And what's worse, I'm not sure AOL's > users would be thrilled either! They can already sign off by writing to > [log in to unmask] (no command needed), and list mail > is a lot more useful if you get it the same day that it was sent. This > customization feature only works as long as a not too many people use it. > Technically, it is trivial to implement. Sending a separate copy of each post for every subscriber would certainly cause us problems with some of our lists. We have cases of lists with hundreds or even thousands of subscribers on one host. We have LISTSERV and sendmail set to send 100 receipients per copy, the maximum safe value with SMTP. A separate copy per recipient would cause severe problems for some of our hosts.