On Sat, March 31, 2012 6:42 pm, Rob Weir wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Fioretti's auto-replier idea is more interesting than a bounce with
>> instructions to non-subscribers.  It in effect makes a moderated-in
>> non-subscriber an automatic subscriber to the thread which they have
>> initiated, and to only that thread.

correct. And the only custom coding required is:

1) shell script that writes to a text file that procmail can read name and
address of every list subscriber (only needed if the native subscribers
list, which the mailing list software must have anyway, isn't already in a
format that procmail may use)

2) set up fake email address which will receive email to process with
procmail

3) write procmail recipe

4) fire and forget

total effort may be as low as ~1 day of work of a competent shell/procmail
programmer

with respect to this:

> Can anyone thing of an end user product with a user base the size of
> OpenOffice that is successful doing user support via an email list?

if you browsed the many threads in which I've tried to promote this idea,
I've always pointed out myself that the problem with OOo-users was that
people wanted to implement a full blown online help-desk system with a
tool (mailing list) which is intrinsically born and made to do completely
different stuff.

I'm not saying that in this case THE way is mailing lists. I am saying
that if you want to do with a mailing list something that _looks_ like an
help desk to casual novices needing it maybe once in life, then my
autoresponder is many order of magnitudes better than anything else seen
around OOo/AOO so far.

> the disproportionate impact of a handful of novice users without list
> skills.

not sure what you mean with this sentence, but with the autoresponder only
people who know what a mailing list is, know how to use it properly and
want to do it would need to subscribe. Does this answer your concern?

Marco

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