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Many of you wrote, wondering why you were getting "Test" messages from
the omega-list administration. The reason is that sometimes a subscriber's
address will go bad, but because they're subscribed through some sort of
"forwarding" service, the address referred to in the error messages their
real ISP sends to the list control address is not their subscription
address. Most of the time, these error messages include real email
headers that allow me to trace who the culprit is and manually remove
the offending address from the list. But some sites aren't so cooperative,
and though they send LOTS of error messages, those messages contain
absolutely no useful tracing information.
When that happens, I must send individual test probes to suspected addresses,
and hope that one of them will come back as an error message. I can then
use that error message to remove the dead subscriber.
Usually, I can isolate the set of test addresses to some subset of the
subscriber list, and avoid bothering everybody with test probes. But
sometimes the offender is not so obvious, or the initial subsets fail
to return the error message I'm looking for. And sometimes I just don't
have time to comb through the list of some two thousand names, weeding
those I'm sure are not the guilty party.
As the message says, the best thing to do with the test probe is to
ignore it---simply delete it silently. It's the one error message I'm
looking for, from the one that did NOT get through. All the rest are
unfortunate noise, made necessary because some email-system admininstrator
set up some really stupid error reporting configuration.
I hope that clears up that bit of confusion.
--
jimo@xxxxxxxxxx
maintainer of the omega-list
omega-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx
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