As I write this, I have something like 900k worth of mail queued up on 
netmeg for grex - mostly addressed to one user.

I figured this would be a good time for us maybe to talk about mail 
etiquette, and maybe make some people aware of what is involved in
handling this kind of mail traffic.

Right now, all incoming and outgoing offsite mail is going through 
netmeg. netmeg is my home machine, running SCO Unix on a 386sx25.
I have plenty of disk space and a fast modem, so large volumes of mail
aren't really a problem for me personally.

However, at this moment, grex has some limited resources.  While I can
pick up the mail from destroyer (the machine at the UM where we get our
internet mail) at 14400 or at worst, 9600bps, I can only deliver it to
grex at this time at 2400bps.  While I have something over a hundred mb
of disk space free, grex doesn't have a whole lot of extra space (at
least not all in the appropriate partitions)  Thus, a single dump of 900k
worth of mail can put some considerable strain on modem time and 
available disk space.  Not to mention that once the mail arrives here,
presumably it'll be saved to the users $HOME directory while he decides 
what to do with it (Not many people have that much mail sent to them just
to delete it once it gets here) and there's limited space on that 
partition too.

While I don't advocate putting any particular restrictions on mail flow
(and in fact have pretty much stopped policing them for both grex and
m-net) I'd like to remind people to be considerate when doing things like
shipping source code, subscribing to high-volume mailing lists and so on,
and maybe check out what resources are required before making the decision
to go ahead with this kind of mail volume.  Every minute that netmeg is
going to be tying up a modem delivering that 900k of mail is a minute that
another user likely won't be able to get on (the phone lines having been
pretty busy in recent weeks)  and also is another minute that is delaying
the delivery of the mail queued behind the big stuff.  If you fill up the
partition allocated for mail with your own mail, other people can't send
or receive mail.  If you save the mail into your $HOME directory, even
temporarily, you risk filling up the user partition and preventing other
people from using bbs - and if you save it to /tmp, even temporarily,
you can break all kinds of things that won't work unless there is space
free in /tmp.

Also, of less importance but still not to be forgotten - all the time that
netmeg spends delivering that kind of mail traffic at 2400bps is delaying
the mail delivery of the other 13 or 14 systems I feed, at least till I
get the other modem installed on the second line.

We've also had an incident where someone subscribed to a high volume 
mailing list from the net, and then promptly disappeared.  If you're not
going to be taking care of your mail on a routine basis, or if you're
going home for 3 mos and aren't going to be logging on to grex for a while,
or you're moving away to another state where we'll never hear from you
again, PLEASE remember to unsubscribe your mailing lists first.  I don't
mind providing mail service in the slightest - it's a great learning 
experience for me, among other reasons for doing it, but it's kind of 
frustrating to spend a lot of time worrying and slaving over keeping the
mail running smoothly only to find out that a large part of my resources
and grex's resources are being wasted carrying mail that isn't even going
to be read.

My goal is to make mail travelling through netmeg as close to internet mail
(in terms of speed and reliability) as possible for a dial-up/out system,
and it'd be a great help to me and to grex if people could take the above
into consideration with regards to their own use of the mail system.

Thank you for your support.

30 responses total.

mju mentioned the possibility of making the more popular mailing
lists into local newsgroups, cutting down on disk space and
transfer time.  Would this help, meg?

   Potentially, once several people start wanting the same mailing
lists.  We could even set up 'exploders' here, such that one copy
sent to Grex fans out to all the folk who want a copy.
   The big thing to remember is that you can get any amount of data
from listservs, etc. if you dribble it out over time.  100K a day
is fine, as long as you pick it up quickly.

Exactly.  It's not really the total aggregate volume over the course of
a week, say, or two weeks, that causes problems.  It's just that the
incoming phone lines and Grex's disk handle large transient spikes
in volume very poorly.

With the help of a little script by mju, I'm going to send some logs over
to STeve so he can peruse the mail usage, and maybe we can come up with some
ideas to optimize the traffic a little.

(For example, yesterday someone sent 10+ copies of a 20+k file to 10 different
users on grex - might be easier to consolidate that somehow...)

I finally cleaned out my /spool (at 1200 baud) and will endeavor to
maintain less space up here. Access to a "real" machine is somewhat
limited now and then ...

if people want to get piles and piles of mail they of course buy an
msen account - for your $20/mo you get about 5 meg of disk space
before we start to think about noticing it.  

(see the item in classified so's i don't sound like i'm being a pain)

This response has been erased.

If we find we are getting a lot of people getting the stilyagi newsletter,
then perhaps it will be time to turn it into a conference - maybe a read
only conference - so that there need only be one copy online, and anyone can
come and read it or download it as they choose.

(In fact, if we were going to advertise something, I'd rather we advertised
that we have a stilyagi conference with all the postings thereof, rather
than advertise that one can get the m/l here)

   Valerie, we can set up a system to explode mail locally, such
that only one copy of a mailing list has to come to Grex.

Yea, but if you do that, you still have X copies of the mail on the system,
once people save it to their mboxes or whatever, right?

Assuming that's so (& I do), it still might help keep down the system load.

  If we get it to explode locally, maybe the way to do it would just be
to set it up as a Unix-newbie-friendly file section type thing?  Where
someone runs a program, and it lists all the mailing lists being currently
received, they select one, it lists all the files currently kept, and they
can tag them for viewing, or (more importantly) downloading?  Trn could
actually probably handle this, the problem is that many might just save them
to their accounts on Grex, not knowing how to d/l....

   Yes, something like that could happen.  There are a couple of mail to
newsgroup translators around.

This response has been erased.

Is there a way to change the name that gets sent out with your email
address in the headders?  For example mine says Andreas John, and I would
prefer that it just say  A.J.

I think that if you add a header saying something like
From: cicero@cyberspace.org (A.J. LoCicero)
this is likely to do it ... but I think the reason you're getting Andreas
John is that this is the full name in your password file entry.  To
change that, enter   chfn   from a Unix shell prompt (or   !chfn   from
a Picospan Ok: or Respond or pass: prompt) and answer the questions.  My
first solution is in case you're attached to Andreas John in the password
file.

I also don't really know for sure whether any mailers might have stored
the full name in your password entry in their private configuration files,
or where the From: entry is generated.

I know that the .pinerc file contains an entry for your full name.  If you
edit it and change the entry, that should be the header on your outgoing mail.

does grex have an official postmaster?

This response has been erased.

Wow, things sure have changed!

okay, here a few questions about mail ettiquete <sp>:
I just read the Mail Limitations file while wandering around on Lynx, and it
says that downloading your mail folders is a good thing to do.  So I tried
to download one of my smaller folders, but when I tried to read it on my
computer, it was all squeezed together with strange characters between some
of the words.  Here's the question: is there a way to download your mail
folders and have them make sense to save Grex's disk space?

Second question:
I also read in the Mail Limitations file about how you should keep your files
being sent down to 100K.  How do you break up your larger files into 100K
pieces so they can be sent?

Thanks!

A mail folder is just a text file, so if you download it to a non-unix
machine, it is important to use text-style conversion (not binary or image)
otherwise the newlines will be improper. How are you downloading?
ftp, kermit, z-modem ??

To split files into 100K pieces, you could use the "split" command.  You
can type "!man split" to get info, or ask if it's not clear.  To put the
file back together again, I think you just use the cat command, like
"cat file1 file2 file3 >originalfile".

I use z-modem.  How do you do the text-style conversion?
Re #24
  thanks, ajax!

One more question about split:
If I've split a file up into pieces with split, how can the person who's
receiving the file put it back together if they don't have a unix system?

  Depends on the target system.  If it's DOS of a fairly recent vintage
(5.0 or later, maybe?), you can use "copy /b file1 /b + file2 /b file3 /b"
to concatinate binary files.  That's probably one more /b than is needed,
but that's the syntax suggested in the copy command's help screen.
 
  It's not clear, but I think that the intent of the suggested 100k limit
may have been to not use mail to transmit lots of data, as it uses a lot
of our Internet bandwidth.  So breaking a 300k file into three 100k chunks
might not make much difference.  But I could be wrong about that...maybe
100k+ really does cause some added problems?  If you *can* transfer a
bigger file, and you need to do it every once in a while, I'd say just go
for it, for simplicity's sake.  The problem arises if lots of people do
it on a frequent basis.  That's my opinion, anyway.

Usually, I don't send files at all, but I have an "eFriend" who wants a
freeware program of mine.  Unfortunately, it's a rather large program: 1.3
mb.

This response has been erased.

Many mail sites impose a limit on the size of incoming files; at grex,
this currently happens to be 1 Mb, but that's actually an order of
magnitude larger than we'd suggest, and might not be delivered at all
(if you don't keep your mailbox quite close to empty) and would probably
result in your mailbox being temporarily disabled (the mail software
will do this to try to keep the mail spool from filling up...) Many
other sites impose a smaller limit, 100K is not uncommon, on either
incoming messages, or sometimes even just messages that are being passed
through.

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss