The short answer is that the list trailer is incorrect. The line is
/// Edit your replies! If they include this trailer, they will NOT be sent.
If this were true, you wouldn't see these 'manual intervention' messages. But
on occasion I take pity on hapless subscribers who have no idea what they are
doing. Basically, now that the eighty or so autox.team.net lists are running
through a DSL line to my house, the bandwidth used up by Clueless Mouse Pilots
who don't put any effort into editing the amount of included text in their
replies is a bigger factor in smooth running of the lists. Based on what I've
seen on some of the busy lists like triumphs, spitfires, land-speed and such,
it could be that roughly half of the bits getting shuffled in and out of the
mail server serve no purpose. As an example, just last night majordomo had
intercepted a message which exceeded the size limit for postings. It was
a member of one of the digest lists, who responded with a one line comment,
followed by 60,000 bytes of the original digest. Cute.
So I'm testing the 'Edit your replies' trailer, and RealSoonNow it will be
added to lists which have a digest. The holdup at the moment is getting the
digesting software to trim it out of each message collected in the digest, for
those lists which use them. I'm fairly certain that the extra bits which the
trailer sends on each message will be more than offset by the reduction in
reply size.
Now, I could just leave it as the trailer says, and have messages which do
not have the trailer edited out tossed in the bit bucket. But there are
likely folks who just don't realize what they are doing, and need a little
education. And in truth, given that the vast majority of the messages which
include *way* too much extra stuff are sent via various pieces of junk claimed
to be useful programs by those marketing thugs at Microsoft, there's a chance
that the users are not so much to blame for their errors. So I do on occasion
go through all the mail that majordomo pulls out and forward on legitimate
messages, after a bit of reworking.
That's probably another reason for the delay in adding the 'Death Trailer' to
the lists which have a digest version. Once I do that, my workload will
go WAY up. Maybe I should just quit complaining, shut off the server and go
work on my cars before race season starts.
Naw, I'll feel better in the morning.
mjb.
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