Brad Knowles wrote:
> Well, we [AOL] already allow them 550 messages. Since we limit
> Internet mail to a maximum of 2MB (assuming you're sending
> attachments), this means we allow each user up to ~1.6GB mailbox
> storage space (internally, attachments can be up to 15MB in size, so
> this would be ~8.2GB, if you were talking about only internal mail).
The problem is the fixed number of messages. I'd much rather see a
disk quota limit, perhaps as an option. That way users who choose to
subscribe to busy lists like mine (the average message is under 1K, but I've
been known to send out over 100 messages in a single day) don't fill up just
because they take a long weekend off as long as they stay within their disk
quota. (I do offer a daily digest, I'll make sure my AOL subscribers know
it is one way around the full mailbox syndrome, although at the cost of
losing some immediacy.)
> >BTW, my 11 year old son keeps pointing out that AOL is still running some
> >spot TV ads.
>
> I believe that the settlement was to not run ads in areas where
> the access points are full, and beyond that we would advertise only
> enough to keep a steady-state membership of eight million users,
> until such time as we've spent that 330 million to upgrade our
> systems, and have the necessary capacity.
Well, one of the places I'm seeing the ads is on the Preview Channel, but
I don't know if their ads are different on every cable service that carries it.
(I'm in Lincoln, Nebraska, and according to the local media AOL lines are busy
here a lot--in fact that's why I dropped my AOL subscription 3 or so years
ago, I could never get on so I found a better provider for me.)
Mentioning my traffic level raises a question, so to return to the general
subject of mailing list management, what do other list managers running
high volume lists do about bounces?
If I'm sending out 100 messages a day, that means I'm sending out one every
few minutes. A two or three hour outage (unfortunately, still common on
the Internet) means I can get a dozen or more bounces from a single
subscriber, well above the bounce threshold for most list packages.
I really don't want to kick people off my lists just because of a transient
net problem, because it winds up generating a lot of traffic to me about
'what happened to my subscription?' so to get around this, on my most active
lists I've raised the limit. As a result I've been known to get a thousand
bounces in a single day.
Are there packages that can discriminate between different classes of
bounces and handle them differently in terms of deciding whether or not to
purge the subscriber? (Procmail/Smartlist doesn't, except for 'warning'
messages, which technically aren't bounces anyway. Speaking of which,
aren't non-delivery notices sort of unnecessary these days for bulk mail, to
to mention nearly as much of an annoyance as 'message opened' notices?)
One thought I've had was that to keep track by days rather than by number of
bounces. (3 consecutive days of bounced messages and you're off.)
Unfortunately, if I'm sending out 100 messages/day, that makes things worse,
because I've got my limit set at something like 40 bounces right now.
Since I'm in free association here, I've seen packages (majordomo-based)
that rolled bounced users over to a daily 'bounce notice' list, is anyone
rolling bounced users over to some kind of digest form as an intermediate
step before purging them? (That would have the advantage of putting my AOL
users on a list form that takes up fewer of their 550 mailbox slots.)
--
Mike Nolan
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