Hi,
 
As many of you know, the FML is delivered to most subscribers by a list
exploder at CUNY, courtesy of Bill Gruber.  One of the facts of life of
mailing lists is bounces - when a user goes away, buggy mailers, broken
links, quota exceeded, decomissioned machines etc.  Up until now Bill has
been manually monitoring the bounces coming back to cuny, and forwarding
those bounces that have occured several times, and seem permanent, to me.
Then I issue an unsubscribe request.  And occasionally we goof, and
unsubscribe someone who has a temporary mail problem, and they get the
unsubscribe notice and get understandably puzzled (and sometimes even quite
angry at me).
 
Now that we're over 500 subscribers, this is getting unacceptably
time-consuming.  Particularly for Bill.
 
Effective immediately, Bill will be unsubscribing bouncing subscribers
without forwarding them to me.  He will still be giving a second (or
indeed third) chance for seemingly non-permanent bounces, but we'll
probably still make the occasional mistake.
 
Therefore, if you receive a notice indicating that you've been unsubscribed
and you don't want to be, accept our apologies in advance, send mail to
ferret-request and I'll resubscribe you ASAP.  We may be able to adjust the
unsubscription notice to contain a copy of the bounce so that you can wave
it in your system administrator's face.
 
We have FMLs going out almost every day (often Saturday and/or Sunday won't
have one).  If you don't receive one in a week, ask your system administrator
about mail problems and then contact ferret-request - remember you can
always get backissues from cuny.
 
Incidentally, if you've ever received a bounce from here, take notice
that we will be changing our access provider in the next week or two.
Our access provider has been providing pretty lousy service, up to and
including sporadic mail forwarding failures which falsely accuse
ferret.ocunix.on.ca of non-existance.
 
[Do you have any idea how hard it is to tighten a power steering pump
belt on a Nissan Multi, you need to be a contortionist to hold on to the
wrench, let alone get at the tightening bolt, while hordes of mosquitoes
are munching on you?  AAARRRRGGGGGHHH!  I hate cars!  Mosquitoes too!]
 
[Posted in FML issue 0854]