On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 23:34, BART RAFFAELE wrote:
> ----------
> From: BART RAFFAELE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 16:51:47 +0800
> To: WAMUG Mailing List <wamug@wamug.org.au>
> Subject: Test please ignore!
While I completely understand your need to test your email and perhaps
to a lesser degree your list subscription, I must point out that sending
an email not once, but three times to a mailing list as large as WAMUG
is in my opinion pretty inconsiderate.
A better way to test your email is to send a message to yourself. This
will test both incoming and outgoing mail.
The *only* reason you should ever send a test message to a mailing list
is when a normal posting you have sent has not come through in 24 hours,
and your test message should say so:
"I've sent a message to the list, it didn't come through, I'm
trying again - here is the text I sent - sorry if you get two."
Now you might get all upset about this response to your "innocent"
email, but consider this:
Your messages contained a total (by the time they got to me) of 5922
bytes. That doesn't seem too much really. I pay 17.6c per megabyte
excess charge. So your message doesn't cost much: (5922/1024/1024*17.6c)
0.1 cent. Now imagine that there are 400 subscribers, so there was 40
cents of cost associated with all of the subscribers. Then there is the
charge for outgoing traffic on the mail server, another 40 cents.
Now your three test messages which contributed nothing at all to this
community cost it 80 cents.
Now I don't know how many actual subscribers there are on this list -
neither likely do you, but if there were 1000 subscribers your test
message cost this community 2 dollars.
If I were to read WAMUG over GPRS - when I'm between towns - my charge
is 2 cents per *kilo* byte, so the messages you sent would have cost me
around 11.5 cents on average, but more likely three or four times that -
the rate varies and includes flag-fall etc. - clearly a fools errand to
read WAMUG on-line. (Unfortunately, I cannot pre-filter mail, so I still
need to download the headers, then do a second download to only read
those I'm interested in - massive inconvenience and increased cost.)
You can argue that you and others don't pay 17.6c cents per megabyte, or
that there is no real cost because your connection plan has data
included, or your Internet access is unlimited, or that the number of
bytes I received are not representative because my mail comes to me on a
tortuous route.
That is not my point, I use those numbers to illustrate that there is an
actual cost associated with each message sent. As a member of this
community I'm happy to bear the cost for questions to do with the
community, with Macintosh problems and humour, but I'm not impressed
when I'm paying for spam or test messages.
All I ask is that you are mindful of the fact that there are people on
the other end of *every* email you send to the list - including this
one. So I would ask that you treat it with respect.
Finally before I shut up, you may well ask why it is that I didn't send
this message to you directly? I considered that, however a public
message requires a public response.
For all of you who've waded through this and are now shaking your head I
ask the following question:
Would you still subscribe to WAMUG if the content was useless?
..let the flames begin..
Onno Benschop
Connected via Optus B3 at S38°01'05" - E145°25'10" (Upper Beaconsfield, VIC)
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