Mon, 10 Apr 2006 06:00:00
This message is a "probe" for your subscription
to the IE-HTML list. You
do not need to take any action to remain subscribed to the
list, and in
particular you should not reply to this message. Simply
discard it now,
or read on if you would like to know more about how
this probing
mechanism works.
A "probe" is a message like the one you
are reading, sent to an
individual subscriber and tagged with a special signature
to uniquely
identify this particular subscriber (you can probably
not see the
signature because it is in the mail headers). If the
subscriber's e-mail
address is no longer valid, the message will be returned to
LISTSERV and
the faulty address will be removed from the list. If the
subscriber's
address is still valid, the message will not bounce and the
user will not
be deleted.
The main advantage of this technique is that it can be
fully automated;
the list owner does not need to read a single delivery
error. For a large
or active list, the manpower savings can be tremendous.
In fact, some
lists are so large that it is virtually impossible to
process delivery
errors manually. Another advantage is that the special,
unique signatures
make it possible to accurately process delivery errors that
are otherwise
unintelligible, even to an experienced technical person.
The drawback, however, is that this method lacks
flexibility and
forgiveness. Since the Internet does not provide a reliable
mechanism for
probing an e-mail address without actually delivering a
message to the
human recipient, the subscribers need to be
inconvenienced with yet
another "junk message". And, unlike a human
list owner, LISTSERV follows
a number of simple rules in determining when and whether
to terminate a
subscription; it doesn't remember that you wrote last week
to warn that
there might be problems with your ISP over the weekend. In
particular, a
common problem with automatic probes is mail gateways
that return a
delivery error, but do deliver the message anyway. LISTSERV
has no way to
know that the message was in fact delivered, and in
most cases the
subscriber is not aware of the existence of these
"false" error reports.
If this happens to you, LISTSERV will send you another
message with a
copy of the delivery error returned by your mail system, so
that you can
show it to your technical people.
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