Re: vacation

[somian@adelphia.net (Soren Andersen)]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 08:59:49PM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 02:46:20PM -0400, Nori Heikkinen wrote:
> > i'm going away for the weekend, and want to put up an auto-responder
> > to let people know that i will be away.

> Oh, please don't.  You wouldn't believe how annoying those
> autoresponders are on a mailing list when they can't figure out who it
> really came from.

A-men! It's horrible that so many people seem to start playing with
procmail / Postfix blah blah recipes without *thinking* first. For what
reason do you want to send 689 people a message saying "I wasn't here to
read this"? That's what will happen if you enable "vacation" without
making sure it won't reply to List traffic.

I have a little story to tell. There's a f**king cavalier attitude I've
detected from some on Debian-User regarding the sheer traffic (number of
incoming messages hitting a mailserver box) that this List generates.
I've got something for people to think about: I've just had to
re-subscribe today to Debian-User (and debian-cd, and debian-perl, and
... you get the picture) for the third time in three months because my
ISP (Adelphia.net) has a 500-message inbox limit by default (MAYBE but
not surely I might have managed to undo that today, we'll see). The
traffic generated by Debian-User alone is enough to overrun this limit
(and I know it's a moronic limit and I know it's Adelphia's fault, and
save your freaking breath, no I AM NOT going to "get a 'real' ISP") in a
couple of days. When that happens, messages start bouncing, and when
they bounce back on Debian-*, the subscription gets cancelled
(hair-trigger there, hey Admin, please give a fellow a BREAK?!).

The lesson to be gleaned from this sad parable is that it DOES impact
some users (maybe not YOU, oh Center of the Universe) that the traffic
is so high. Internal filters that send email messages into the VOID that
is /dev/null After They Are Already Inside The Box are *not* the sole
solution. They are not going to help in those situations like mine
because the messages are being delivered to the ISP's server (and then
being scooped up periodically by fetchmail). I can run fetchmail more
often (now that I know the nature of the problem) but that still leaves
the central point being: it DOES impact some users in some situations,
that the List traffic is so high.

So, to return to the original subject: PLEASE make sure you aren't being
an a***ole by playing with 'vacation' settings while subscribed to
"Debian-*".

-- 
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