On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 18:54:44 -0500 Brad Knowles <brad@his.com> said:
> 1000 or 1500 might be fine for now, but I guarantee you that it
>wouldn't last -- probably a month or two, then people would start
>subscribing to even more high-traffic lists (because now the problem
>doesn't happen any more) and then we're right back where we were.
No because there's a limit to how much e-mail people are willing to read
per day. I'm not saying it wouldn't go past 1000 or 1500, but at some
point it would very definitely stop expanding.
> If more people subscribed to digests for everything, this
>problem would be virtually non-existant.
Yeah but digests are so much trouble that I wouldn't even dream of this.
There are just too many people with accounts at ISPs that can't handle a
HUGE 50k digest. Sometimes they dump the whole message on the floor,
sometimes they cut it in the middle. The users expect you to know why and
be able to fix it. Sure, you can lower the digest size to 10k, but then
people who have a real e-mail account complain that they want to get 1-2
digests per day, not 10. Or you can make the digest size configurable at
a significant resource cost, and you're left with clueless people who
don't know how to reduce or increase the default value, as the case might
be (there is no direct relationship between the cluelessness of the user
and that of the ISP).
Personally I'd rather get 1000 bounces a day as a result of not using
digest by default than 20 complaints a day about missing digests. I can
program my computer to take care of the bounces, in fact I now use
probing on most of the lists I run and I don't see any bounce, and in the
next version of LISTSERV transparent probing will be the default and
everything will happen under the hood where it belongs, you'll just need
a bit more horsepower than when you do all the processing manually.
Between that and the major players (like AOL) moving to DSN, I think
bounces will soon be a problem of the past. But when people ask about
their digest, I can't have the computer answer for me, not today and
probably not in 10 years either. So, on the lists I run, I make sure
digest is not the default option so that it is only used by people who
will know how to turn it off.
Eric
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