I probably owe an explanation for those test messages, at least to those
who haven't gotten the explanation directly.
Pobox.com is a service I use to run this mailing list. They offer majordomo
for a fairly small annual fee per list. It's a relatively new service for
them -- their main business is providing "permanent" email addresses and
mail forwarding -- and they recently moved their majordomo processing to a
new computer that is dedicated to that purpose.
Well, they did a really poor job of moving majordomo to that new system,
and it caused all sorts of problems for them and for all of their majordomo
customers and subscribers. I sent exactly one "test message" to see if
their new system was forwarding anything at all. Much to my surprise, it
forwarded several dozen copies of that message to all of the pen-geos
subscribers. I emailed and phoned and generally made a lot of noise with
pobox.com about it. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything I could do. I
considered unsubscribing everyone temporarily, but the message was being
re-sent from the outgoing mail queue and not from majordomo, so that
wouldn't have made any difference. I couldn't even send another message to
the list to explain the situation, fearing that it too would be repeated a
zillion times. Nor could I even send messages directly to the subscribers,
because pobox had also screwed up my ability to access the subscriber list.
So all I could do was keep hammering on pobox.com to fix the problem, which
they eventually did.
Things appear to be working normally again. I plan to continue using
pobox.com for now, mainly because it's quite difficult to switch to a new
service, but also because pobox.com claims to have learned several lessons
and has implemented some process changes internally so that this shouldn't
happen again.
It's probably not obvious that running a mailing list is a difficult task,
and so I can understand why subscribers get upset when their postings don't
go through, when administrative messages get posted mistakenly to the list,
when someone spams the list with an unrelated advertisement (or worse), or
in this case, when a single message gets repeated over and over and over.
I've been running mailing lists since 1991 using a variety of mailing list
management programs and operating them on computers at home, at work,
through ISPs, and now using a mailing list service. I'm convinced that it's
inherently prone to occasional problems. There are a lot of imperfections
that arise with Internet mail delivery, various other mail systems with
gateways to the Internet, system administrators of all kinds, subscriber's
autoreply and mail filtering programs, the mailing list owner, and even the
subscribers :-). Usually, the problems are just a small annoyance, but
every so often, something really blows up. When that happens, I'm always
tempted to get out of the mailing list business (if you can call it that).
However, I stick with it because it seems like a worthwhile thing to do
with a little spare time and because I get just enough thanks from the
subscribers to remind me of that.
So again, thanks for the thanks -- both the public ones on this list and
some very nice private mail as well.
---Brian Smithson brian@grot.com