Responses on high mail volume to these lists

[lauren at rand-unix.ARPA]

I've received a lot of direct mail on this topic, so I thought
I should summarize.  The general responses follow, including my 
comments on each:

1) Force all query replies to go to the author, not the list, and get
   the original author to summarize for the list.

This is what I'm doing now, of course.  The problems:

   a) There's no way to prevent people from CC:'g lists, either manually
      or through poorly defaulting automatic reply mechanisms.

   b) Not everyone has the time, disk space, or inclination to handle
      floods of replies from a simple query.  It doesn't seem practical
      to insist that people become, in effect, "forced" moderators when
      they may not have the resources to do so.  Obviously there are
      some people who DO have such resources and even the inclination,
      but you can't force such things.

2) (Mainly for Usenet) Buy higher speed modems.
   Use satellites (e.g. "Stargate").  Buy bigger, cheaper disks.

All of these alternatives are fine, but it must be remembered that they
are only stopgap measures.  As the flow of information from more and
more people continues to increase, we will outstrip virtually
any affordable technologies.  Telling people to buy new, bigger disks
is one thing, but many people simply cannot change out their equipment
so easily.  And in the bandwidth area, even "Stargate" is not an
infinitely wide information channel--there are very definite limits
to what we can afford to send for any reasonable sort of cost.

But most importantly, I personally don't think that the volume problem 
should be attacked form the standpoint of "how can we get more and
more information (regardless of content, repetition, etc.) to flow"
when we can't even deal with what we're getting now.

3) Use smart mail handlers.

This view says that with sufficiently smart mail readers and
analyzers ("notesfiles" was one suggestion) people could manage
to find the time to wade through more messages.  As I implied
above, this doesn't seem like the correct way to approach the situation.
Why pay to send and store so much material when you're going to
throw most of it out as repetition or "noise" messages?  

Smart mail handlers would be a help, but don't seem like the solution.
Even if *very* intelligent mail scanners were built--ones that were
so smart that they could be reliably trusted to show you all messages
you want to see and none that you don't want, this still seems like
a comparatively wasteful solution from a resource standpoint.

4) The nets as we know them are doomed.  The "noise" ratio
   will get worse and worse from more and more people, and
   eventually we'll have so many megabytes a day of data flowing
   around that practically nobody will be able or willing to read 
   any of it.  The nets will sink to the level of metro CB radio 
   and stay there.

I don't agree fully with this, but I do feel that unless practical
solutions are found and implementations begun soon, we do have
a rather dismal network future before us.  

--Lauren--