See, I do read the list once in a while!
Getting people to do the right thing is not easy. Sure, it is easy to
forgive new folks who are not used to dealing with mailing lists, but those
seem only a small percentage of the ones who don't do things right.
Look how many regular list posters can't handle simple things like keeping
line lengths under 80 characters, and cutting down on unneeded quotes in
replies. Having something *REALLY* complicated like sending add, drop or
address changes to "british-cars-request@autox.team.net", as it says every
morning in the preamble of the digest and in the intro message I send out
to all new folks, is expecting way too much brainpower on the part of list
members, I guess. Of course, my favorite recent example of a great request
was something like:
From: dweeb@new.address
Subject: Address change
My new address is dweeb@new.address.
That was the entire message, and of course "dweeb" was some nifty alias
this person thought up, rather than any name found in any of the lists.
I guess they figured I would know exactly who it was without them giving me
any clue as to the old address and their real name.
RealSoonNow I'll at least have the capability to send sign up or drop requests
from the Team.Net home page (http://triumph.cs.utah.edu) for those who use
WWW info server clients like Mosaic, but no matter how smart you make the
computers, you can't do much about the person at the keyboard. So it goes.
mjb.
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