response 26 of 118:

Feb 17 01:22 UTC 2007

Re #23: The conversation I was referring to was

  resp:agora56,4,87-106

Unfortunately all of Dan's responses have been scribbled.  I can't quite
reconstruct what was said, but it's clear I was confused by the answer, and
I'm still confused.  Bruce Howard said this in response 97:

It appears if you log in with a non-interactive shell, for example:
   "ssh grex.org bash -i"
no login record is made.

response 28 of 118:

Feb 17 04:19 UTC 2007

Regarding #26; Yah, that was sort of for work.  Long story (and one I can't
really explain anyway).

Perhaps the discussion was for non-interactive shells.  E.g., when one does,
``ssh cyberspace.org ls'' and things like that (incidentally, that's what is
happening when one does ssh cyberspace.org bash -i...).

response 30 of 118:

Feb 19 16:05 UTC 2007

That should fix /var/mail for quite a while.  Thanks.

response 32 of 118:

Feb 20 03:51 UTC 2007

Did you reap a lot of mail accounts without any mail or spam in them?

response 34 of 118:

Feb 20 04:05 UTC 2007

Re your first question: No idea; we don't track that statistic.

Re your second question: the quota was raised some time back.

As to your third question: What (other) people do, or don't do, with their
mailboxes is not really any of my, or your, business.

response 36 of 118:

Feb 20 15:48 UTC 2007

Re question three, since new users are not being given mail accounts without
requesting them, and since many or most of the old users with mail accounts
probably are not using them for anything, would it make sense to reduce the
number of unused mail accounts of people who are not doing ANYTHING with their
mailboxes and did not want them in the first place.  Note the '3 months of
disuse'.  I was not suggesting keeping people from forwarding mail.

response 38 of 118:

Feb 20 18:05 UTC 2007

What is the new mailbox limit?  I have been forwarding anything over 100K to
another account.  What are 5000 people still using grex for if not mail?

response 40 of 118:

Feb 20 18:21 UTC 2007

Regarding #38; I have no idea.  Maybe you could ask them.  I doubt very highly
that it's email: most people aren't interested in the 1980's style of email
experience that grex offers.

response 42 of 118:

Feb 20 19:48 UTC 2007

I dont really use email here but I do forward it to another account. 
Every now and then someone I havent talked to in a while sends me email 
to my grex account and it is nice to be able to still get it. Of 
course, nowadays I get so much spam at that account I probably would 
miss any personal emails sent to me. 

response 44 of 118:

Feb 20 22:37 UTC 2007

I think things like, ``a lot'' and ``lots'' are relative.  Steve, could you
quantify them?  If 500 people use grex for email, that may seem like ``a
lot'' but compared to the overall population of the Internet, or even of
grex users, or even to the places where many of us work, it's really pretty
small.  Handling email for them, with decent spam filtering, really
shouldn't be a problem on grex's over-powerful server.

If 100 distinct people check out party over the course of six months, I'll
be pleasantly surprised.

If a university or high school (outside of the Ann Arbor area) somewhere in
the United States or Western Europe points to grex for a C programming
class, or *any* programming or Unix class for that matter, I'll be pleased
but similarly surprised.  To the extent that we're getting these people, I
suspect they are coming from abroad, and that as the technology wave
continues to roll over even 3rd world countries, their numbers will decline.

I suspect a lot of the people who use grex are those who are curious about
public access systems, or want a more private place to do web browsing and
the like, as Steve said.  Some want to move files around, and the like,
also.  And there's nothing wrong with that; those are the kind of uses we
*should* be encouraging.  I feel affirmed that someone makes use of grex to
do something useful, like find information about diseases that affect his or
her life.  I think it's great if people use grex for homework or scientific
study (I recall a few years ago, some guy sent email to staff asking if he
could run some fairly computationally FORTRAN programs on grex; I thought
that was really cool.  It's certainly the type of use we should be
encouraging).  We should encourage more of that.

Steve, do you have any pointers on who these people are?  We should try and
figure out how they found grex and how we can get more like them.

response 46 of 118:

Feb 20 23:44 UTC 2007

Well, since we did a reap like, three days ago, and only around 6200 accounts,
not that says that the number is less than 6200 users.

I'm not sure we should be making grex *email* more attractive to use.  If
anything, we probably should be discouraging people from using grex for email
as anything but a last resort.

Look: the reality of it is that the email problem has just gotten too hard
for what grex can handle with its *staff* resources.  And that's not going
to change.  We can do a reasonable job for a couple of hundred users, but
anything beyond that just isn't going to work out without a full-time staff
looking after mail.  Such is the way of the world; please learn that we're
just going to have to deal with that reality.  Unless someone just doesn't
have another choice, they really should look elsewhere for email (e.g.,
hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc).

If someone wants to use grex because they don't trust the others, then fine,
but they're going to have to deal with all the spam and unreliability.

Again, the thing that's lacking here is *staff*, not machine resources. 
Technically, it can be done, but not without a lot of hand holding.  It sucks,
but that's what happens when a network takes an infrastructure designed in
the 1970's for a closed environment of trusted individuals and thrusts it into
the 21st century on an untrustable network.

response 48 of 118:

Feb 21 02:09 UTC 2007

Re #45:  If an account is active, it is allowed to have an email account
whether it is used or not.  Other than not using the account for spamming,
it is not our business what email is going into or out of the account.  As
long as the user account is active, the mailbox can remain full and new mail
getting rejected.  It doesn't matter if there is a .forward or not.  If the
user account is active, staff does not make it a habit to go looking in the
account to see if there is a .forward or not, it is none of our business. 
If staff starts doing this or is required to this I will no longer be staff.
It is an invasion of privacy.  If the user account is not active, then the
account and its attached email account will be reaped during the next reap
session.

I would not want staff poking around in my account just because it thought
that I might or might not be making use of the email account that was created
along with my user account, nor would I as staff be doing that to other user's
accounts.

You have been told many times that spam is a problem.  It will not go away.
There is not a hell of a lot we can do about it.  Even if we put system wide
spam filters in place, people will have to be able to opt out of them.  I for
one do not want anyone else filtering my email.  My email is my private
business as long as I am not trying to spam with it, I will deal with it
myself, no one else can make the decision for me on what is spam and what
isn't.

As for var/mail filling, we are working on ways to deal with it that don't
involve invading users' privacy.  We just did a huge reap that should take
care of the problem for now.  We are looking into getting more space for
var/mail.  It takes time.  Please give us the time without doing any more
harping about the situation.  We are aware of it.  We all deal with it in our
professional and personal lives.  You only have to deal with it for you, we
have others besides ourselves that we have to deal with it for.  We just can't
keep up with the deviousness of the jerks that send the stuff.  At least not
right now, this very minute.  The whole world is having the same problem. 
A lot of money is being lost in both business and government because of it.
Continuous berating staff about it will not make it go away any faster.