LISTADMIN. Archives and List errors

[Rzepa, Henry]

Two list admin items

1) I have archived the list up to September on

http://emily.ch.ic.ac.uk/listarch/xml-dev/index.html

This is a direct link to the CD-ROM  image, that will
be mastered shortly.  The collection has been indexed to
mid September, and  I will re-index to end of Sept shortly.
Any comments, offers of extra materials etc must be sent
within THREE days, or forever hold your peace!

2) The "decay rate" for registered accounts on this list that
no longer work continues at about  10 per week. This is
often because 

a) local email handling at the user's  end is changed/reconfigured,
and the email account which the user uses to post changes slightly.
For example, john.doe at somewhere.com changes to  jd at somewhere.com,
or perhaps jd at machine.somewhere.com changes to jd at somewhere.com.
Changes like this will result in the user being unable to post to the list,
resulting in confusion for them, and time needed by  Peter, myself and others
to analyse and suggest fixes to the problem.
b) The user leaves their organisation, but does not unsubscribe their
xml-dev registration, or expects us to  "track" their changed email
details.
c) Changes in a number of email handling programs can mean that
only  DNS registered clients can now post to eg POP servers. This
happened to us a few weeks ago, and its amazing how many unregistered
computers were flushed out of the system (some people assume that an
IP address can be assigned arbitrarily out of a range of  256 numbers). 
This causes us to receive "we do not relay" messages. I repeat again
that when we receive what looks like "hard" errors, I will unsubscribe
these unilaterally. Much  as I would like to eg contact the postermaster
at the remote site and sort things out, I just do not have the time and
resources to do this. Increasingly also,  I am beginning to take a less
generous view of  mailboxes that report "quota exceeded" for 1 week
at a time. Any mailbox that is over quota for more than a few days we
assume is moribund.

So if you find yourself suddenly not receiving mail, please do not
assume sinister actions on our part. Chances are it may be due to
local changes at your end, or apparent hard errors at our end resulting
in unsubscription.  A simple resubscription, using the mode
mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk with the message

subscribe xml-dev  (or)
subscribe xml-dev-digest

should resume service for you.

It is my fervent wish that we will shortly move to a much superior
list handling system (perhaps Lyris) with much improved service.
However, the timescale for this is entirely out of my hands.

Best wishes (and apologies for the long message)


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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xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
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List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)