** Reply to message from Jim Osborn jimo@eskimo.com on Sat, 08 Jan 2005 13:31:44 -0800

On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 2:05:50PM +0200, Stan Goodman wrote:

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** Forwarding message from Mailer-Daemon@massart.edu...

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Sorry. Your message could not be delivered to:

paonia,Mass College Art (The name was not found...

If I put a copy of the above in a bottle and throw it into the sea, is there a chance that the administrator of this list will eventually receive it, and find a way to get bounce messages to HIS mailbox?

No. As Charlie pointed out, this list is maintained at some distance from its membership. But, since it's SmartList, which is very much Procmail based, the obvious fix is technical. Here's why I haven't seen one of those things in years:

# #Toss these stupid notes from bogus smartlist-list subscriber # :0

• ^From: .*Mailer-Daemon@massart.edu
• B ?? paonia,Mass College Art

/dev/null

Put that in your personal .procmailrc file and move on... :)

Jim

I don't have a personal (or othetr) procmail file, because I am not _nix user. But I understand you to be telling me to set a filter in my mail client.

It is a piss-poor comment on a mailing list and on its "maintainer" (I use the word loosely) that the fix for a user who has neglected to unsubscribe is for all the subscribers to set filters in their mail clients. If twenty others neglect to unsubscribe (ARE there twenty subscribers brutto?), each of us will need to maintain the filter too. What, if anything, is the "maintainer" doing with his time? Does he know how to unsubscribe a vanished subscriber? Or he doesn't give a tinker's dam?

This list is much like the sailing ships of legend that, having disappeared in the Bermuda triangle, suddenly reappear many years later, sailing with no crew aboard, and then desappear again into a fog bank for another decade.