Administrivia re. auto-reply messages

[Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>]

It is a vacation and conference time of year, and many of our subscribers
seem to have set their mailers to send to *every* message an
auto-response: "I am out of the office until xxxx; I will respond to you
then," or some variant of same.  For many of your e-mail lists, such as
liblicense-l, this kind of repeated auto-reply causes havoc.  Numerous,
numerous supposedly "moderated" messages come to the list and the
moderators have to open each one.  A few are indeed messages to the list
but most are "I am away" messages.  Additionally, our listproc gives us a
daily quota of messages, and if we receive a great number of messages, the
excess cannot be processed till the next day, or without a special re-set
intervention by our ITS services.  The numerous "I am away messages" have
lately interfered with our ability to process real messages, therefore.

In general, the problems are with non- educational servers (i.e., .org or
.com), rather than .edu. The .edu subscribers seem either to be able to
absorb messages while they are away or to set up their auto-replies to
answer only the first time and suppress further responses.  We are
grateful for this!

In the past we used to write to each of you and ask you to change your
settings while you are away, but the volume of "away" messages at this
time makes such responses impossible for us.  Of course we do not wish to
lose you as our subscribers, but we ask, if possible, that you set your
"away" auto-responses to be a little more reader-friendly:  i.e., if your
mailer must respond, please set it so that it responds only once, and not
repeatedly.  Thank you in advance for doing this.  It will help *all* of
your correspondents, not just us.

And now we sit back and await the few dozen or so auto-messages that will
come in response to this one!

With best summer wishes,

The Moderators of liblicense-l