Re: Explain again please...

Listserv is the program running at the U of Sask that sends out the e-mails
to this list. When a new mail comes in addressed to Alt-Process, Listserv,
the program, must send an e-mail to each and everyone on the Alt-Process
list. If there are 1000 people on the Alt-Process list EACH person's mail
server must receive a message addressed to them from the U of Sask. The
chances that a) the internet is functioning and available in every part of
the world and b) that the mail server on your provider's end is up and ready
are not 100 per cent certainties. The U of Sask server might get any number
of errors when trying to send the message to you, server unavailable,
mailbox full, no such person, Time out error,...etc. along with probably
scores of other errors or reasons why the two SMTP servers couldn't complete
the request. What does Listserv do? The program is smart enough to try
again, but it uses a timeout method similar to Dlog. It'll try again in 3
hours, if that one fails, it'll try again in 12 hours, if that fails it'll
try again in a day or two, or however the administrator has set the system
to fail gracefully. It may even eventually unsubscribe you from the list.
Truth be told mail lists are not a very efficient way to handle this type of
forum, they just happened to be one of the first methods of doing so. They
don't scale up very well either. They're peer-to-peer systems. Can you
imagine if everyone on the Internet one day decided to subscribe
Alt-Process? Everytime one person sent an e-mail it would generate
two-billion e-mails as a direct result. For small groups like this they're
OK though but not perfect. Usenet's not much better, the messages are one
level of abstraction removed from the user and sit on your ISP's local
server where you can retrieve them at your disposal. Still, this creates
LOTS of duplicate information. The best system is to use a central server
based system, web-based, which maintains all the messages and limits the
overall traffic on the Internet. It's a serious issue for this and other
groups, one which we should talked about or suggest to Mr. Holt.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Judy Seigel" <jseigel@panix.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 1:20 AM
Subject: Explain again please...

>
> Why is it that I often get e-mails after they've been answered and
> re-answered on the list? Is that because my server is so tetchy or busy
> or inept? Or Canada doesn't like blue states? Or???
>
> Meanwhile, ladies & gentlemen, good night.
>
> Judy
>
Received on Tue Jan 11 17:00:07 2005