managing this listserv

Fellow subscribers - 

Just thought I'd take a moment to remind you about the overhead
of this listserv group.

After a couple days off over the weekend, I found I had waiting
for me several hundred error messages from the listserv program
about accounts which were still apparently bouncing messages due
to some sort of fatal problem.  Some of these were people e-mail
ids which were no longer in existence or valid, others were 'full
mailboxes', as well as a generous sprinkling of insundry transient
errors.  I chose to modify the group's setup so that people would
not be automatically dropped due to transient errors or strange
problems like those some of you experienced in the past year.  In
exchange for this, I get to deal personally with a lot more errors.
Being the kind of guy I am, I tend to give people the benefit of
doubt and not remove them from the group at the first sign of
problems.  I took a couple of old accounts off the group last week and
I am still getting error messages from those accounts as the listserv
still tries to mail old discussion messages to those apparently
invalid e-mail accounts.

Why am I telling you this?

I have always taken it as my personal obligation to manage my own
e-mail affairs myself, making sure I am not oversubscribed to lists
and overfilling my mailbox, removing myself from lists before my
account expires or is cancelled from the internet.  Apparently so
people don't share this pro-active approach.  While it is true that
people like me can help in the event of problems or if you really
cannot manage to unsubscribe yourself, please be aware that I get a
large amount of these requests all the time.  I enjoy participating
in the group and I think people enjoy my posts.  Sometimes when I
go silent it is because I am still trying to unravel these errors and
deal with people's individual problems.  It can at times be overwhelming.

Not really complaining, but if ever the idea arises in you mind that
'someone else will clean things up for me', consider my case as I slave
away to read hunders of errors messages and deciper their specific and
diverse reasons, considering how I should deal with them on an
individual basis.  After looking at 300 hundred 'user unknown' messages
for a single expired e-mail, the odds seem good that I might remember 
your name for a long time . . . .     ;-)

If any of you are confused about how to manage your listserv affairs,
check out the following web page I prepared (and bookmark it for the
future!):
http://www.support.net/Medit-Plants/discuss/subscribe.html

your humble listserv-ant
Sean O.

Sean A. O'Hara                       sean.ohara@poboxes.com
h o r t u l u s   a p t u s          710 Jean Street
'a garden suited to its purpose'     Oakland, CA 94610-1459, U.S.A.
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