new setting for Medit-Plants

Fellow Medit-Planters -

Thank you for the number of 'thank you' note both to me personally and to 
the list.  My note was not intended to inspire such mail, more to inform 
you all of the reality of the situation, but thank you for sending your 
sentiments.

I just modified the Medit-Plants list to automatically drop users for whom 
their address is reported as invalid.  This setting has been in place 
before, so this is not necessarily going to really change anything that 
you'd notice.  The number of time people let their e-mail accounts expire, 
requiring clean-up from someone like me, is not the most prevalent problem, 
but it is routine (I just this moment removed another user after receiving 
a few dozen e-mail error messages from the listproc, each time someone 
posted a item to the group).  I had been hesitant to change this setting to 
'auto delete' because of an interesting situation that happened years ago:

One of our subscriber's ISP was bought out by another ISP.  In the process 
of taking possession of these new accounts, they modified their system in 
an erroneous manner.  A symptom of this problem was that an error message 
was generated by the new ISP for each Medit-Plant e-mail item posted.  The 
real problem was that the e-mail address of the SENDER, rather than the 
recipient was named in these error messages as an account that was 
invalid.  The subscriber recipient in this case was still receiving all of 
her Medit-Plants mail and did not realize anything was amiss.  So, the 
upshot of this was that each person who posted a message to Medit-Plants 
was automatically dropped from Medit-Plants for doing so!  NOT the desired 
effect!  Took me a while to puzzle out, and that is when the setting was 
changed to what is was before I just now changed it back.

I think this was a very strange anomaly, but I mention it to you not only 
because it is rather funny in a perverse sort of way (especially now, long 
after the problem is gone!), but also to point out that technology does not 
always work as intended or in a manner that makes sense.  It takes people 
being vigilant to make sure thing are working properly.

I still have a dozen or so inquires from Medit-Plants and from the web site 
to deal with, but I do promise (as requested by many people) that I will 
try and get to posting something to the group in the near future.

Now, back to my cage . . .     ;-)
respectfully,
Sean O.

h o r t u l u s   a p t u s     -    'a garden suited to its purpose'
Sean A. O'Hara        fax (707) 667-1173     sean.ohara@groupmail.com
710 Jean Street, Oakland, CA 94610-1459, U.S.A.
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index