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Subject:Re: mail failure message?
From:Joshua Van Tol
Date:Thu, 4 Mar 1999 19:38:35 -0600

>     Quite a few of us are getting it. I expect another one as a result of
> posting this message. Some errant buggaboo somewhere no doubt. No sense
> being concerned about it as everything seems to be working fine. If Gannett
> is missing the messages let THEM worry about it.
>

Actually, this is a vanagon list issue, and a real problem.
Apparently what happened is that someone  subscribed to the list,
from usatoday, and then lost their account, perhaps as a result of
violating some company policy against using company resources for
personal uses?

The reasons this is a real problem are these:

1.) We are wasting bandwidth sending messages to a non-existant
subscriber, then wasting some more bandwidth handling the bounce
message.
2.) We are irritating some list members.
3.) We are probably irritating the USATODAY postmaster, who is
doubtless noticing all this traffic in the logs...

Now, whenever someone sends a messge to the list server, it sends out
a message to this guy, whoever he is, and the server at usatoday
sends back a bounce message, which goes to the sender of the original
message, because their address is in the "reply-to" header. The
solution to this problem is for the list administrator (AHEM, are you
listening?) to get on the ball, and take this acccount off the list.
This should have happened immidiately, as it did when Coyote was
admin, but for whatever reason, it hasn't. I've sent private email to
David Marshall, who is, I beleive the list admin these days regarding
this issue, and he hasn't seen fit to take action on this problem, or
reply to my message, so I'm giving him a hard time on the list. Not a
polite thing to do, I agree, but called for in this case.

Joshua Van Tol -- jjvantol@uswest.net