List Management; Was Big African Grifters

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
Date: Wed Mar 20 10:21:54 2002

Rumor has it that Dan Wright may have mentioned these words:
>Er, this might be a little late...but...
>
>There's been one really good suggestion made that everyone seems to have
>glossed over: put something like "[OL]" before any message coming from an
>un-subscribed address. That's all! You can make your e-mail client filter
>that! you can make procmail filter that! If any off-list message was simply
>MARKED, then each of us could deal with off-list stuff in our own way!
>
>Personally, I don't care about it. Everything from classiccmp gets sent into
>it's own little mailbox by procmail anyway -- hence why I'm replying to this
>NOW, when I saw 300 new messages after the weekend I didn't have time to do
>anything with it :) however, putting a marker like this on any off-list
>message requires little work, avoids the possible problem of losing equipment
>because someone who's about to thrown out that pdp-11 can't post a message,
>and lets each list subscriber deal with such mail in any way he or she
>wishes...

One small problem with that: If the person's not subscribed to the list,
how do they know they're supposed to put an '[OL]' in the subject? [[ That,
and then the "new flame wars" - 42 list members flaming some poor soul
because he honestly forgot to type [OL] in the subject before he hit
"Send"... ]]

unless - if the list manager software that Jay uses has the ability to
differentiate between on-list & off-list posters, maybe a small
configuration change could be made to prepend an '[OL] ' to the subject
coming in from any off-list email address automatically? That might work...
but to me that would only be a solution if it doesn't cause any extra work
for Jay.

>I'd also like to say that I think Jay does a fine job managing the list and
>I'm grateful to him for doing so. Without him we wouldn't have a list, and
>that's worse then a little spam, isn't it?

Most definately.

Just my $0.000000002 worth, and it ain't worth that...
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   ---   sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right???  Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 10:21:54 GMT

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