Subject: A good lesson for all

From: Arthur Wang <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 15:35:16 -0800 (PST)

Dear Netters,

You must have been quite familiar with me and with my mail rubbish since
last Friday. Now I believe the trouble is over. Please accept my deepest
apologies. 

I have found what had happened: I posted my message to three mailing list
at the same time. There is at least one e-mail address does not work in
the drug.dna list. Thus one copy of my mail bounced back. But the
mailserver kept its fail-and-resend procedure until the mail was three or
four days old. Meanwhile, all the other netters received dozens of those
mails. This is really like a careless nurse distributing drugs to her
patients: The dead has been dead while the health have to continue to
"enjoy" the cure. 

In this case, reset the mailserver or quit the mailing list does not work.
Finally I contacted with our mailserver manager and we changed the
settings of the mailer: "Expire time" to a very short time and "Retry
time" to a very long time. It worked. 

It is a good lesson for both the mailserver managers and the users. More
attention should be paid to prevent such things from happening again.
I am very glad to see Simon's apology. It is enclosured at the end of this
mail.

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Wang
[email-masked]

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From: "Simon Stevens" <[email-masked]>
To: "Drug DNA Interactions List" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Public Apology For Arthur Wang's Resent Message !

Dear All,

Please stop flaming Arthur for his multiple messages ! The problem 
was due to our mailserver hanging on Friday afternoon, & looping his 
messages infinitely !

May I apologise to you all for this tecnical problem at our end, 
caused mainly by our mailserver running out of system resources.

 ( For the tekkies out there, this list is currently being 
handled on a Netware server using Mercurys' Maiser function. It seems 
that once the mailing list starts getting excessive, Maiser starts 
having problems dealing with sending mail out. Time to move the list 
over to a Unix+MajorDomo solution, methinks !).

Sorry !

Simon Stevens.
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= Simon Stevens,               =    E-Mail :                         =
= Informatics Officer,         =    [email-masked]          =
= Faculty Of Science,          = Or [email-masked]    =
= University Of Portsmouth.    =    Tel. No.: (01705) 842014         =
======================================================================