List Management - RESPONSE

I feel the need to chime in with some support for Jay. This is a high-traffic list with a lot of recipients, which surely takes a nontrivial amount of bandwidth and system resources to host...people shouldn't lose sight of that fact. I run a couple of fairly large mailing lists myself; something like this isn't a "set it and forget it" thing...Spam is the least of the problems, most of the time. People with crappy network connections whose mail gets backed up and queued, Windows programs that screw up everything in sight when moving mail around, twenty-line messages turning into 50Kbytes due to rampant Microsoft HTMLization bogging down the mail server, etc etc etc. It's a pain in the ass, and it takes a certain amount of babysitting to keep things running smoothly. Jay does a fine job. He may not have started this list, but he runs it now...and that counts for a lot. I hate spam as much as anyone. Actually, I hate spam a lot MORE than most for various reasons. But guess what...My mailer has a "delete" function, and I actually know how to use it! Wow, what a concept. I know, I know..."but spam slows down my net connection!" If your net connection sucks so badly that a little (or a lot) of spam bogs it down, then get something faster. There's no real excuse in this day and age. Spam blows dog, there's no question about it...but it's a fact of life on the internet today. Everyone should fight it whenever and wherever they can, but you WILL get spam if you have an email address. The sooner people learn to deal with that, the happier everyone will be. Further...there are lots of off-topic conversations on this mailing list. I take part in many of them, so I'm as guilty as anyone. But you know what? Humans are social animals, and this list is a social thing. Many of you are my friends. If there's an off-topic discussion here that you don't want to take part in, well, use that magical "delete" key...Every mailer has one. In other words...if anyone here has a life that's so utterly perfect that spam and off-topic discussions can offset the friendship, comeradery, education, and other classiccmp benefits, I'll swap lives with you any day of the week. Sheesh. -Dave -- Dave McGuire "Watch those lateral G's man, St. Petersburg, FL I've got sandwiches in my lap!" -Sridhar