File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postco_1995/postco_Mar.95, message 58


Date: Thu, 2 Mar 95 07:45:14 EST
From: ma-AT-dsd.camb.inmet.com (Malgosia Askanas)
Subject: Re: ATTENTION PEGASUS USERS


> What more can I say than I've just applied and I can understand your 
> problem...after receiving 164 messages you have to question something or 
> someone...

The problem is an artifact of the geographic diversity of this list and
the diversity of mailers people use in various places.  I suspect that
when the majordomo software (which is the software that handles
message distribution to this list's sub**ribers) was written, there
was no anticipation of Pegasus and its RCPT-Confirm-Request feature,
so the software contains no safeguards against distributing the
resulting RCPT Confirmation messages to the whole list. 

But I want to make the following point.  This list is run by a bunch
of volunteers at the invitation, and with the support, of the folks 
at IATH in Virginia.  It is not a commercial venture, and the time
spent managing the list is all contributed time.  As far as I can see,
this list is very much needed and promises to become an excellent thing. 
But it is a collaborative venture.  It is not a producer-consumer kind
of enterprise: the su**cribes are not passive recipients of a service,
but must see themselves, in all respects, as the list's co-makers.  
The list is made possible through the capabilities of mechanical computation 
and electronic distribution.  Like all technology, these technologies
have their problems, and the fact that one piece of software may
not have been written so as to properly handle the output from another 
piece of software is one of them.  We (the spoon collective and the
IATH tech staff) will do our best to try and fix the Pegasus RCPT 
Confirmation problem at the software level, but it is not fixed _yet_, 
and will take time.  So all of us, co-creators of this list, must
learn, in the meantime, to work with what we have.  In particular:

-  People using Pegasus must learn to configure their mailer in such a
   way that they can write to the list without triggering the RCPT 
   responses from the Pegasuses of the readers

-  Everybody should have some patience with those RCPT Confirmation
   messages that _do_ get generated.  Understand that just ONE message
   written with the RCPT-Confirm-Request feature turned ON will
   produce multiple RCPT messages -- one will be produced every time
   anybody using Pegasus reads the original message. 

This list is new, it is being built.  We are all building it.


- malgosia 


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