You may have noticed a couple of changes to the list. First off, the slew of
duplicate posts should have been stopped. Basically there was an ISP with a
few customers on this list that had some problems over the last week.
Probably their biggest problem is they actually thought some decrepit
piece of junk from those marketing thugs at Microsoft could be trusted to
work when hooked to a real network, so they were spitting back a slew of
posts to the list, instead of where they should have gone. Hopefully that
is now fixed. Well, not the decrepit junk that Microsoft pawns off on a
naive populace, I just meant the dupes for this list.
You may have also noticed the addition of this trailer to each post on the
regular list: [1]
///
/// mgs@autox.team.net mailing list
/// (If they are dupes, this trailer may also catch them.)
This serves several purposes. I'm most likely just dreaming, but it may
actually prod folks who respond to list messages into using some common
sense, courtesy and intelligence when responding. If you just blindly add
the complete original message in your reply, you are hosed. If you spend a
moment or two to actually think about your message and edit included
text to only that which is sufficient to make your point, then you'll have
no trouble. Some of the lists run here at autox.team.net have had on the
order of 80 percent included text, only 20 percent original stuff. I know
that a large number of you may not care at all, since you aren't the ones
sitting here watching the activity lights on the server flash, and you don't
have to pay the ISP and network charges. More on that later.
If you use that virus magnet Outlook Express, I think there is a box you can
click under the Tools -> Option menu to not automatically add the entire
message to your responses. While there, you may also wish to change the
default setting that automatically adds to your address book the address of
folks who post to this list. This 'feature' seems to have the main purpose
of using you as a patsy to speed up the propagation of email viruses without
your knowledge.
Perhaps these changes will improve the list, perhaps not. We shall see.
mjb.
1. A digest issue may have gone out before I was done with reconfiguring
the list, so digest subscribers may have seen the trailer a bazillion
times, give or take a dozen.
///
/// mgs@autox.team.net mailing list
/// (If they are dupes, this trailer may also catch them.)
|