You wrote:
> If every list manager felt this way, the newsgroups would be very quickly
> filled with "your mail is bouncing" messages ad infinitum.
Indeed! There are mailing lists out there with 100K subscribers!
Imagine how much bouncing mail they have! Even I, with a "mere" 2K
subscribers get hundreds of bounces per week and about 1-3 addresses
are removed from my list each week. Imagine if I posted about all of
those! Ugh.
I'm in the process of rewriting the FAQ for a newsgroup and am putting
in netiquette guides (such as "advertisements are generally considered
unwelcome in this group"), this example makes me think it wise to put
in blurb about the above cited example of off-topic posting before it
truely becomes a problem. One ad, private post (which is what these
bounce notices are), or other off-topic post in a newsgroup per month
or two is not a big deal, however given the growth of usenet
readership and propensity for copy-cat activity this could easily
become a problem. Better to say at the outset that such off-topic
postings are generally considered unwelcome. This may very well go
into the revised newsgroup FAQ.
If someone who is bounced from a list *really* wants back on, they
will find a way to contact the list-owner. Happens to me all the
time. ("hey, Michelle, I like changed addresses, but my mail was
forwarded and so I forgot to update you, but now I haven't gotten any
FATFREE mail in 5 days, maybe my forwarding stopped, did you bump me
or something? can I get back on?"). If they care so little about the
list that they don't even notice they are not longer getting list
mail, why bother to try to contact them by posting an off-topic post
to a newsgroup read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people who
have no interest in reading about that bounce announcement?
If the user reads the textile group and really wants to be on the
mailing list, I think they are capable of posting to the group asking
about the wherabouts of the mailing list if they can't find the
list or list owner's address.
--
Michelle Dick artemis@rahul.net East Palo Alto, CA
Owner, FATFREE Vegetarian Mailing List
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