On Mon, 13 Feb 1995, Per Starback wrote:
> Here's another pet peeve of mine: it seems like a non-negligable part
> of the subscribers who subscribe and then unsubscribe very soon after
> never even thought they were interested in the list -- they just
> subscribed because it was an assignment in some Computers and the Net 100
> course to subscribe to a mailing list. I get sort of tired having to
> spend time on adding and deleting those users, and there's no target
> to direct my irritation at. Grrrr! Very frustrating. :-)
Every introductory book on the C language starts with a program called
"Hello World". We have no equivalent for mailing lists. If we had an
equivalent, it would ease the training burden for the rest of the list
administrators.
A proposal for helloworld mailing lists:
1. Subscription, and unsubscription would go through the normal
mechanisms, ie. listserv, majordomo, helloworld-request,...
2. Each night a robot sends the subscribers a message, something like
hello, this is Tuesday, here is how to unsubscribe, other usefull
mailing list resources are ...
3. People who fail to unsubscribe after 3 days are automatically
dropped.
4. Mail to the list address would get a automatic reply, something like
thanks for your message, had this been a real mailing list it
would have gone to many, many people. Here are the first 10
lines of your message...
5. To prevent loops, the server can keep track of addresses for that
last month, and silently drop excessive email.
6. There should be several similar mailing lists, so that no single
postmaster is overwhelmed.
7. The software can be configured to only work for folks in a
particular domain. ie. foo.edu could set up their own server to
spare the rest of the net, without being obligated to serve the
whole net.
8. An instructor could assign as homework subscribing, sending mail to
the psuedo-list, and unsubscribing. The instructor could require that
the students hand in the messages, or if the server runs at his
institution, he could check the logs. Getting hit by the
auto-unsubscriber should be points off.
Questions:
Is this worthwhile?
Should I write some software to work with Majordomo?
If I do write it, can someone port it to listserv?
Would you be interested in running this at your site for public access?
Would you be interested in running this at your site for local access only?
I don't want to start an email training server, unless I knew there would
be several others. My site is already used for some email training. The
limiting resource is how much mail postmaster mail am I willing to put
up with. The resources on the machine are pretty trivial. My hottub,
hottub@hamjudo.com, is used by instructors at the Copenhagen Business
School in Denmark as a homework assignment. It gets a lot of
mail of the form:
Hallo, test af email
This is my very first e-mail i send out! ;-)
Alas, since these folks are frequently just setting up their email, a
small percentage of the messages have invalid headers. This means that
postmaster@hamjudo.com (me) gets a few messages a week. 5% of 15
messages a day isn't bad. 5% of 1000 messages a day would be awkward.
5% of 10000 messages a day would be a problem.
---
Paul Haas paulh@hamjudo.com Web site: http://hamjudo.com/index.html
Home: (313) 487-8739 Office: (313) 487-4357 Fax: (313) 487-4371
Finger or email my hottub at hottub@hamjudo.com, seen on TV
References:
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