Garbage on the coblist

[Shannon C. Dealy]

I am sorry about all of the garbage you have received on the coblist
lately, but there is little I can do to prevent it short of going to a
moderated list.  I would prefer not to change to a moderated list since it
could on occasion delay mail to the list by several days or more, and it
means more work for me as well (and there are those who would respond to
this with the immediate CENSORSHIP outcry).

The problem is that in both cases (the automatic reply message loop and
the stream of complaints about unsolicited email), the mail came from
members of the list.  In the first case an automatic reply was setup for
all incoming mail so that every message sent to the list resulted in a
reply from this person's system being sent to the list (which resulted in
more replys to the list).  In the second case, the account of the person
who was complaining had been a member of the coblist since the first week
it was created, so it appears that the person had no clue what they were
talking about.  I have removed both of these people from the list, but in
an unmoderated list these things are bound to happen.

One person has indicated if they received any more of this garbage they
would unsubscribe.  If anyone wishes to do so, I quite understand, I get
tired of this junk too (you only have to hit the delete key, I have to fix
the problem and respond to queries from other system administrators about
the complaints they receive).  To unsubscribe from the cob mailing list,
send email to "majordomo at deatech.com" with the following line in the body
(not subject) of the message:

     unsubscribe coblist

You will receive an automated response indicating that you have been
removed.

I try to correct these problems as quickly as possible, but contrary to
popular rumours, I do occasionally sleep (the most recent problem
started early this morning about an hour after I went to bed).

A few of you may not have received some of this junk (or none of it if you
are really lucky), this is not the result of my spending any time
censoring the list, but because I killed these messages in the outbound
mail queues when I discovered the problem.

Shannon Dealy
dealy at deatech.com