I have unsubscribed the person who had been receiving mail
at a Red Cross address, but this event raises some
interesting issues for the list and perhaps some of you,
too.
First, as I have said before, each of you must be
responsible for your subscription to the list. I don't vet
addresses ahead of time, or query you individually about
whether you can receive mail at your address. If your
company has a policy restricting the receipt of private
e-mail or limiting your storage, the onus of following it
rests with you. If I can, I will certainly try to help--if
you are unable to unsubscribe an old address or have mail
trouble--but I am merely a backup.
>he can not unsubscribe at work,(no access now) his work
At first blush, it seems that the person who was unable to
unsubscribe was a victim of his IT people, IT meaning
"Information Technology," i.e. the technicians responsible
for keeping servers running and mail flowing. Unfortunately,
it appears that the IT people so concerned about his mail
spool didn't do what competant administrators do in such
cases. It is a trivial matter to configure a decent mail
server to forward, discard, or bounce mail for people who
leave a company or run out of their alloted space. For some
reason, it seems his IT people didn't do so for him. I
cannot guess why.
Sorry to burden you with such detail, but it may be helpful
to have a reminder every once in a while that you need to be
aware of the limitations of e-mail.
As we have quite a few members who have hotmail addresses,
it might be worth mentioning that hotmail is notorious for
unreliable service on the back-end, the part that I interact
with most frequently as a system administrator. Hotmail
servers have often been overloaded, and mail to them bounces
much more than it should. I have adjusted the bounce
parameters of the list to be more tolerant of flakey mail
servers, but I will apologize in advance if the list
software unsubscribes you suddenly. I do have a "bounce"
list operating that periodically notifies addresses that
have suffered transient failures, but it is an imperfect
system, and as long as fatal errors from servers like
hotmail pile up, the list software will eventually have to
unsubscribe you.
Again, sorry for all this detail. Let's not have any
follow-ups to the list and instead get back to our regular
scheduled programming.
--Arthur
ack@skylee.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 22:30:37 PST