[Dixielandjazz] Going on vacation this Summer? an E-Mail tip:

[david richoux]

Hi all,
I am on a lot of e-mail lists and this weekend I experienced something 
that should never be repeated. A member of the Contrabass list (low 
instruments and related musical topics) set all of his e-mail to 
"Auto-Reply Vacation Mode" and went his merry way.

Little did he know that the Contrabass list was set up to automatically 
send out all received messages, so a near infinite loop happened. The 
Contrabass list manager was away for the weekend and had no computer 
access so over 800 messages were sent to the list. (and more than 4000 
messages went to the list manager!) People on the list tried contacting 
the administrator of the vacationing e-mailer, the list and anybody 
else that could help but we still got all of those messages...

There are list programs that can automatically detect and correct 
problems like this but that was not the case here - so the big lesson 
is:

When you go on vacation - set your mail to No Messages,  or 
unsubscribe, or whatever, but NOT Auto-Reply!

anyway,

Dave Richoux