Mr Ryan's auto-responder problem ... (Re: [ltp] Plese turn off James Ryan's auto responder!)

[James Ryan]

Hi, this is James Ryan...of the infamous "autoresponder incident" which
apparently will go down in the annals of "ltp" history as a crime
against humanity...perhaps I should present myself to the Hague for
prosecution?

To those of you out there who dreamed up all sorts of punishments for me
to prosecute my "crime" of forcing you to press the delete key a few
extra times, let me assure you that any punishment you could imagine
would not compare to what I have endured the last two weeks.

On Thursday, 14-April I was struck with a sudden, critical illness that
required immediate treatment.  There was no time to set up an
autoresponder or notify colleagues and friends.  One of my co-workers,
Blair Strang (who has written much of the Linux Kernel IP tunneling code
and is no slouch) hastily set up our ISP's mail server to autorespond to
all my emails, as a courtesy to people who weren't aware of my illness.
My assistant was monitoring my voice mail, which is why he included the
cell phone number.  He regrets that he did not test the ISP's
autoresponder to assure it properly filtered mailing lists.  However, he
assures me that the following day, when he received mail from some of
you (the smarter ones) at our support address, he immediately rectified
the problem...less than 24 hours after setting up the autoresponder.

Apparently, the problem was caused by a combination of (1) our ISP's
mail server not properly filtering for old mailing lists when
responding, and (2) the Linux-Thinkpad list running a four year old
version of mailman.  Ironically, I have in the past requested that this
list upgrade the mailman software for other reasons (compatibility with
base-64 encoding), but was ignored.  Also, though I subscribe to at
least ten other mailing lists, none of them experienced the same
problem...all were able to successfully filter out my autoresponses,
because they run the 2.1.x tree of mailman, which has been available for
two years.

I am not blaming this on our ISP, we are at fault for not testing the
capabilities of our ISP's mail server with all of my subscribed mailing
lists before implementing the autoresponder.  I apologize for all of the
inconvenience we caused the list.  As for those of you who remarked that
an IT company should know better...unfortunately we are a startup and
still rely on our ISP for mail services.  As a result of this incident,
we will be moving our mail servers to our internal network so that we
have control over these things.

I have read the various responses many of you posted while I was
recuperating (and listened to the voice mails).  Several of you gave me
the benefit of the doubt (ben, honey@gneek.com, Bj=C3=B8rn Mork, Paul Mundt=
)
for which I am grateful...it speaks to your maturity and
professionalism.  To those others of you (you know who you are) who
responded with sarcasm, threats of retaliation and worse, I offer this
advice.  Rarely in life are we aware of all of the circumstances
surrounding any given situation.  The prudent and mature course of
action is to always give people the benefit of the doubt.  It was
neither malice nor stupidity which lead me to cause such inconvenience
to the list, rather it was an unfortunate and sudden turn of events,
compounded by server problems both at my end AND on the linux-thinkpad
mailing list side.  Once again I repeat my request that the list upgrade
to mailman 2.1.5, which has been available for almost a year.  Why are
you still running 2.0.8, which is four years old?

Though I feel I have provided helpful advice to this list in the past
(the ACPI HOWTO, the CPUSPEED HOWTO, etc.), and have certainly benefited
greatly by your advice, as a result of this incident I feel I can no
longer participate in the list.  Thank you all for your insight over the
years, I will miss you.

Regards,
James