Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!bbn!gateway!PIZZA.BBN.COM!jr
From: jr@PIZZA.BBN.COM (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: The recent spate of advertisements on this list
Message-ID: <26034.586036735@pizza>
Date: 27 Jul 88 19:58:55 GMT
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com
Organization: BBN news/mail gateway
Lines: 31

> To those people: What makes you think you have the right to waste other 
> people's money (in the form of computer resources and the reader's time to 
> read/dispense with the message) to make money for yourselves? [If I partook 
> in name-calling I would do it here.]

Please please don't.

I sent a message yesterday to the affected people (internet list only,
[including you, Mr. Bigwood] not comp.emacs) apologizing for what, to
me at least, was an obvious mixup in the automatic cross-posting of
the usenet news to the internet list, and indicated that I was working
on it.  The message headers include indications that the messages
traversed an automatic crossposting system, including a mailbox to
send to if there are questions or problems.  I did receive one message
from another unix-emacs recipient that correctly guessed the problem.

I have already received word that the bogus postings have stopped.
The list they came from is called "ne.forsale", so the messages were
entirely appropriate to the list where they were originally posted.

I will not try to defend the crossposting system, other than to say it
has worked extremely well over the last few years.  This spring we
moved it from Berkeley to BBN (did you notice?) with hardly a hiccup.
I had observed that it seemed to refuse to forward mesages from usenet
with certain "Distribution: " headers, and asked the maintainer to
look into it.  Part of the resulting change apparently caused the
crossed lists for a few days.  I am now confident it is repaired.

/jr
unix-emacs-request@bbn.com (Arpanet; Domainish)
bbn!unix-emacs-request or bbn!jr  (Usenet)