The following explains why it is bad to send a message to multiple mailing
lists.

-COPY-<<<<<

Subject: Re: mass crossposting to rootsweb lists
   Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 21:58:14
   From: Brian Leverich 

Hi all -

Here's an explanation of what's going on:

Each of RootsWeb's mail servers is designed to receive about 1,500 incoming
pieces of mail each day and deliver them to the list subscribers.

Cross-posting an article to too many lists (say more than 5 lists) can seriously
interfere with the operation of one of those servers.

Why?  Consider what happened this morning, when someone cross-posted an article
to 50 lists.

This particular thread, because it has been cross-posted to 50 lists and spawned
about 20 replies that were also cross-posted, has by itself generated about
1,000 inbound messages.  That's almost doubled the load on the server.

That's bad.

What's worse, the servers are designed to receive an inbound piece of mail on
average about once each minute.  When something is massively cross-posted to 50
lists, though, the server has to absorb essentially a whole hour's worth of work
arriving within a few milliseconds.  That *really* jars the machinery.

And here's what's *really* bad:

A few poor souls were subscribed to all or most of those 50 lists.  Within the
span of a few hours, they received 50 copies each of 20 messages.  That means
they were mailbombed by a 1000 pieces of e-mail, and that caused them all sorts
of pain.

So that's why RootsWeb discourages massive cross-posting.  However, we haven't
announced a formal policy because folks don't make this mistake too often, and
anyway we're working on a technical solution that would simply make it
impossible for users to accidentally do this.  Cheers, B.

--
Dr. Brian Leverich       Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative       https://sites.rootsweb.com/
P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798      [email protected]

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