From pschleck@oasis.novia.net Fri Sep 6 18:24:27 1996 Received: from MIT.EDU (PACIFIC-CARRIER-ANNEX.MIT.EDU [18.69.0.28]) by bloom-picayune.MIT.EDU (8.6.13/2.3JIK) with SMTP id SAA05077; Fri, 6 Sep 1996 18:24:26 -0400 Received: from oasis.novia.net by MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA13113; Fri, 6 Sep 96 18:23:51 EDT Received: (from pschleck@localhost) by oasis.novia.net (8.7.5/Novia) id RAA20237 for news-answers-request@MIT.EDU; Fri, 6 Sep 1996 17:23:50 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <199609062223.RAA20237@oasis.novia.net> Subject: Re: Suggestion: front-end *-answers mailboxes with checker program To: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 17:23:49 -0500 (CDT) From: "Paul W Schleck KD3FU" In-Reply-To: <9609062100.AA21923@portnoy.MIT.EDU> from "emhavens@MIT.EDU" at Sep 6, 96 05:00:36 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25 PGP6] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > > Hello, > > The queue was, in fact, a few thousand messages deep, but it's smaller > now. Also, I'm all for getting rid off all the junk right away, but the > problem is that some people submit faqs and questions to us by posting > to news.answers. So, we can't just go through and ditch everything that > someone posts to news.answers, unfortunately. Anyway, if you send a > message now and get the auto-reply message, you'll see the queue's at > about 200 messages. :) > > Emily Havens > one of the *.answers moderators > news-answers-request@mit.edu > Thanks for the reply. I did notice that your queue has trimmed down considerably. The fact that the queue *did* get that deep implies that it could possibly happen again, though. I do agree that you can't just ditch everything that comes though the *-answers mailboxes. However, you can use the checker program to help filter and categorize it. Here's my assessment of how E-mail is distributed: *-answers mailboxes: almost all junk articles (usually generated by newsreaders) occasional FAQ submissions posted from news almost no hand-sent administrivia *-answers-request mailboxes: almost all hand-sent administrivia almost all hand-sent FAQ articles almost no junk articles The latter can be dealt with by manual review. The former can be properly categorized and filtered by the checker program. Junk will get tossed out with a generic reply form-letter ("junk" is submissions that fail all checker tests), and FAQ submissions will either get saved, or sent back to the originators with a diagnostic output (the diagnostic message can suggest sending a note to news-answers-request for more human-based assistance). Does this give you a clearer idea of what I am suggesting? -- Paul W. Schleck pschleck@novia.net http://www.novia.net/~pschleck/ Finger pschleck@novia.net for PGP Public Key