I've been thinking on this some more, and I think I've found a solution.
First of all, the ferret mailing list can be run entirely automagically.
In fact, aside from anonymous post checking and subscription changes,
it is automatic.  All digestification and email preparation are done
by shell scripts.  Many times the only thing I do is say:
    ./sart
and there it goes...  The only reason why I still do this manually is
that I'm worried about anon postings slipping thru without being "fixed",
and you'd lose my occasional snarky comments.
 
Soooo, what I'm going to do is the following.  When I go on vacation,
I will give plenty of warning.  I will set things up so that "sart"
is invoked from cron once per day.  An issue will be produced each
time sart starts up and there's something pending.  During this time
anonymous submissions will NOT work.  Anything sent to ferret-list
will be transmitted as-is, without any anonymous header munging.
 
This being said, the only thing that would interrupt flow would be
my machine going down and staying down.  Which it hasn't done for
many months (ever since I upgraded the OS) - my only outages have been
due to power failure but this system reboots itself.  But you never know.
 
For that eventuality, I've set up an alias on my machine called
"bill-bounce".  Bill can send mail to this to see if my machine
is still alive.  If it is still alive, he will receive an acknowledgement
from my machine (you should test this now Bill ;-) within a reasonable
amount of time (I suggest 24 hours).
 
If he determines that my machine is dead, he can then broadcast a message
to the list, soliciting that any messages be sent to him for retransmission.
And he can forge the list in my name.  Just before I go on vacation, I
will send him the latest list of subscribers.  The only questionable
part is that of numbering.  He *should* be able to start from where
I left off, but it still leaves the possibility of duplicate issue
numbers...
 
I'm still collecting requests for inclusion in the emergency response
list, but we'll see whether this is going to be useful or not.
 
This also brings up a completely different subject, one that I've
been pondering (with some regret) for some time.  I find myself
trying to support a mailing list, 3 software packages (one *huge*),
3 FAQs, a 3 year old, 10 acres, a real job and...  And I think I'm
going to have to shed some of them.  Partially because I find I don't
have enough time to do justice to some of the software.  I find
myself staying up to 3am most nights trying to keep up.
 
One of the things I've been thinking of is to close off my 5 years
of operation of this list by making a formal USENET proposal for the
creation of a rec.pets.ferrets.  The traffic in rec.pets about ferrets
has risen substantially over the years, so it's probably an
opportune time.  Having a rec.pets.ferrets newsgroup would probably
best serve most of our membership, and help reduce the overlap/redundancy
of the current situation where we have a mailing list, rec.pets,
and other forae (is that how you spell the plural of forum?) such as
the pets forum on Compuserve.
 
I realize that simply creating a rec.pets.ferrets group would
disenfranchise those of you that don't receive USENET.  For that,
I would be also proposing a bidirectional news-2-mail gateway
between rec.pets.ferrets and those people who cannot receive
rec.pets.ferrets via USENET.  While it may not be a good idea
to put the gateway on ferret.ocunix.on.ca itself, it could be put
somewhere else.  And all I'd do is help manage the list of
subscribers.  Anonymous posting would still be possible, I think -
I could implement an anonymous posting mechanism - purging From:
lines is easy.  The difficulty is signatures.
 
You'd get a bigger audience, and this could spark a real take-off in
the interest in ferrets.  The only real downside is that you'd be
subject to the occasional bit of stupidity from Roger David Carasso
alias Rachel Dafni Christi alias ... and others of the same ilk.
 
[Posted in FML issue 0296]