LISTADMIN: Majordomo list errors, policy and future

[Rzepa, Henry]

Dear all,

Some members of this list may have seen some of the glitches and
errors generated by the  Majordomo list software this list uses. I
have been endeavouring to sort out some of the reasons  for this with
our Centre for Computing Services. This posting explains my list
policy for trying to deal with some of the errors that occur, and
indicates a possible future stategy

1. Approximately 5-10 new errors occur each day deriving from
the 1400 or so subscribed email addresses. These tend to
be two types; 

1. Temporary errors, including Disc quota exceeded messages
(quite a lot of those!!)  and "message that you sent has not yet been 
delivered to all its recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue"

These errors  I ignore, unless the error occurs repeatedly, in
which case the entry is unsubscribed. 

2. What  I perceive to be hard errors. These come in many sorts.
One common one is "cannot relay", or they can be more obscure
such as "Cannot exec /db/mail/bin/ofcuto: No such file or directory"

My policy is to unsubscribe these entries. This is done without
any attempt to contact the owners, since mail cannot be delivered
to them!   Feedback suggests that some of these
hard errors are sometimes fixed a few days or a week later,
but more often they are never fixed.   If for some reason, you
suddently stop receiving xml-dev postings, it may be that
you have been unsubscribed in this manner. You 
can still catch up on the postings by inspecting 
http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
I would also ask that you re-subscribe by posting to 
majordom at ic.ac.uk the request
subscribe xml-dev
Please try to avoid the alternative form
subscribe xml-dev j.bloggs at mail.domain
since this requires moderation on my  part, and I only do this
in batches about twice a week (less if I am away, such as shortly
when  I will be on holiday!). 

I have received several mailings along the lines that the user
expects their email account to change frequently (as often as
once a month in one case), and requesting that we track 
such changes here, or provide instant responses
to requests to change the subscription. Whilst this might be possible with eg
Lyris (or other commercial software), please accept that
currently, I simply do not have the resources or the time
to provide such a service.

3. Majordomo has many other curious holes and peculiar
errors. After considering the matter carefully for some time,
my Computer centre has now agreed to evaluate  Lyris as an
alternative. I will keep the list posted on whether it will be possible
to migrate to  Lyris  and to offer what  I hope will be an improved
service.

Dr Henry Rzepa,  Dept. Chemistry,  Imperial College,  LONDON SW7 2AY;
mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk; Tel  (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 

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List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)