Before you went off on it it might have been better to politely let the admin know what happened, maybe it was just a one time thing, email and listservers aren't infallible. Sometimes a mail to you bounces through no fault of your own but an intermediate server problem. It's possible that over the past 6 years enough emails bounced that they tripped the 'too many bounces' counter. I would have just tried resubscribing and maybe send a mail to the admin letting them know there was a problem. Mailing lists are set up to automatically bounce bad addresses, it doesn't matter if it's a large or small list. Most unsubscribes are really due to an address no longer existing. There will be on any list that has been around a while bounces that do not result in an automatic unsubscribe. These take the administrators time to sort through the headers, and figure out who bounced (it really isn't always easy, the original address may not be anywhere in the bounce.) I manage a small list, around 10 people, I got about 40 messages in the last year and several bounces per massage, and when I do get a bounce message, I may have to send test messages to figure out who has a bad address. It's even possible someone else subscribed with a bad mindspring address and the server matched the headers to your address. Another possibility is someone subscribed with a forwarding address like you can get at bigfoot.com, and forwarded to mindspring. If they cancel mindspring, the bounces come from mindspring, with no clue to it being another address. Jim Muth wrote:
At 12:48 PM 8/24/03 -0400, H. Harry wrote:
I suppose that you all might know this, but worms such as "so-big" "Klez" etc... raid other peoples mailboxes and send messages to, and apparently FROM those folks...
So all it takes is some who has (lets say) "Jim Muth" in their mailbox, and suddenly the virus on kluelessloser's machine is spamming everyone in the name of Jim Muth... and they dont even know their machine is infected... the list bot cannot tell that it is not the REAL Jim Muth, or his real Domain....
I'd agree that it is annoying to have messages bounced back to you, or get unsubscribed...
but if I was the list administrator I'm not sure i could tell the real messages from the spoofed ones...
so just grin, and bare it ( * )
Ha! You appear to actually be defending the peanut-brained idiot.
It is the job of a list administrator to tell the real messages from the fakes. If the administrator in question cannot do this for some reason, then he should resign from his position and turn the job over to someone who can. If no on else is available who will take the job, then there is so little interest that it might be time to kill the list.
The fracprogrammers list sends about 1 message per week. This is certainly not too much traffic for a single person to monitor. If the poor wretch truly is unaware of the situation or can do nothing about it, then he should crawl into a corner, stick his thumb in his mouth, start crying, and consider himself unfortunate indeed.
And if you are trying to tell me that there may be hundreds of infected computers out there distributing spam and viruses in my name, and the owners of these computers don't even know that their machines are infected, then I would say that the entire internet system is broken, and I had best stop using it until it is fixed. If it can't be fixed, then to hell with technology. We would do better by communicating with mental telepathy, and now is the time to start learning how to do it. (Yes, I am aware of how the various viruses, worms, etc. work. That's why I'm so annoyed.)
None of my machines has ever been infected by an electronic virus. And I'm no cyber-genius. I open all my e-mail in text mode. I never open e-mail attachments unless they are obviously legitimate jobs in proper format from known customers. This is very simple. There is no excuse for being infected.
I am certainly not going to change my e-mail address after 8 years. In fact, if I am irritated just one more time, I just might quit the internet entirely.
I have posted the FOTD nearly every day for the past 6-1/3 years. I have done this because it has been fun. If it stops being fun and becomes an ongoing irritation . . . who knows . . . maybe I'll buy a chicken farm and start raising chickens.
Jim M.
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