Message-ID: <v02130504ad1bc04f46c2@[196.20.20.2]> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 07:44:00 GMT+0100 From: Dr Eberhard W Lisse <mailto:el@LISSE.NA> Subject: Re: Budget war spilling over to this list -Reply To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
JohnAt 5:13 PM 11/1/96, Jonathan Sanford wrote: >Dear Eberhard,
>
>I don't think you should be so hard on US government employees who were off
>because of the recent furlough. (I'm not one of them--we have our annual
You misunderstod me totally.My sympathy is with the employees. My point is not that they have a month off, but that they don't go in to read their mail. I actually did not consider that an issue when posting.
The point is that their mail system is set up incorrectly by the system administrators. There is no RFC that I know specifying you can restrict the number of mails like this. And secondly the mailer blasts that to the whole list, again and again. I don't really mind once but even the procmail I use can be set up to exclude lists and to only send these messages once per email address by caching them.
>appropriation, so we worked the whole time. But many agencies didn't.)
>People at AID were unable to go to work--in fact, they violated the law if they
>reported to work or took anything home with them to do. (Federal law.
>Financial penalties. Possible jail time for major violators, such as agency
>administrators who allowed non-emergency people to work.) It was a lockout.
Amazing!
>Nobody expected it to go on so long--not the President, not Congress, and
>certainly not the employees themselves. People at some agencies held
The thing wil do wonders for the next elections in marginal states I am sure.
>demonstrations ("We Want to Work") or had "Work-ins" (where the building
>security staff had to drag them out). Now that temporary funding measure has
>been agreed to last weekend, Federal employees should be going back to
>work--at least until January 26, when this craziness could start again. Except
>on the East Coast, where Washington DC is located, since the weather
>bureau has given us a big snow job. We were out three days because the city
>was totally snowbound, and another big storm is due tomorrow.
But that time you get paid, eh? :-)-O
>As for the mailbox setting: a lot of people do not limit their mailbox, since
>they get messages from the public that way and most internal messages
>within their agencies are now electronic. Necessarily, most people have very
>very large mailbox allowances. I had 683 messages when I returned from a 10
There is no RFC spcifiying the number of mails that can reside in a mailbox this is an administrative matter to make them empty their mailboxes...>day vacation once. The system works fine except when the whole system
>goes unattended for a month. I imagine some people at AID who
>communicate with the outside world via e-mail (the public, contractors, news
>services, NGOs, etc.) could easily have three or four thousand messages in
>their box. Try facing that when you come back to work after being locked out
>for a month!
No problem. I had almost a thousand when I cam eback form Senegal the other day. The point is not their many mails, the point is that their mailer is misconfigured *AND* it blasts this to a list where people have to pay up to 60 cUS for each bouncer!
>I normally like your contributions, but I think you were unfair on this one.
Misunderstood perhaps :-)-O?
-- Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Swakopmund State Hospital mailto:<el@lisse.NA> * | Resident Medical Officer Private Bag 5004 \ / +264 64 461503 (pager) 461005 (home) 461004 (fax) Swakopmund, Namibia ;____/ Zone/Domain Contact for the NA-DOM Vice-Chairman, Board of Trustees, Namibian Internet Development Foundation, an Association not for Gain. NAMIDEF is the Namibian Internet Service Provider.