You know, I thought this wasn't going to be that big a deal. The basic
calculation went like, say, I spend around 20 hours per month dealing with
list errors, about 25% of that due to AOL subscribers on the 4 big real-time
lists.
That's 5 hours per month of my spare time taken up by some of the 289 AOL
people, out of 7,130 total subscribers ( 4.03 percent) on all of the 27 lists.
Four percent of the people, causing one quarter of my workload. I could move
them to the digests, drastically cut the returned errors, and have an extra 5
hours a month to work on one of my cars, or get that catalog started, or
whatever. You know. like sleep. It really is 4 am, and I really do want to
go home to bed.
So, I move the 287 people from the 4 busy lists to the digests, joining the
305 aol folks already getting the digest mode. I figure no major problem,
more aol folks are already on the digests than I'd move, so there aren't any
real technical issues.
What do I get? A barrage of
"The *digest*?? My heavens, man, my life is RUINED! Oh, woe, how can you
DO such a cruel and thoughtless thing to me, you cad!"
So much for getting that 5 spare hours this month!
But I do not manage these lists to make a point about your typical aol user.
I manage these lists because I am, I have been, and I will continue to be
committed to using the power of this technology to help make the sports car
experience we all cherish available to the world. And an unfortunate fact
is that the world contains ungrateful, loudmouth, immature, whining idiots.
And lots of bad software, as well.
Luckily it also contains a fair number of folks that actually appreciate the
effort I put into this scheme, and have said so both publicly on one of the
four lists affected, or in personal mail to me. And luckily the world also
contains people dedicated to something useful, like me and these lists.
If you are an aol subscriber on a digest, and have not been able to deal with
it, and want to be on the real-time list, send mail to:
majordomo@autox.team.net
In your message, put in the following four words, and nothing but the following
four words:
unsubscribe name_of_digest
subscribe name_of_list
Now, I imagine you can figure out that you should replace name_of_digest with
one of the following, as appropriate:
ax-digest
british-cars-digest
mgs-digest
triumphs-digest
And, name_of_list should be replaced with the appropriate string from these
following choices:
autox
british-cars
mgs
triumphs
And I *strongly* suggest you don't let your mailbox overflow in the future.
mjb.
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