Spearfish Announcement Pending; Subscriptions to List

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Ardis R Eschenberg (and others) recently wrote:
> What are the dates for Spearfish?  I'm sorry, I can;t seem to find where I
> wrote them down (if I did).

I believe Dick Carter is now connected to the list through his current
email address, and that an announcement concerning the Spearfish Meeting
is pending.  I don't know any particulars regarding the meeting.

This provides an opportunity to say a few words about falling out of
contact with the list:  this is easy to do nowdays with everyone's email
addresses changing constantly, but hard to detect, if you forget to move a
subscription, because sometimes the list is just quiet.  If you are
wondering if you've fallen out of the loop, just check the archives at
http://www.linguistlist.org.  If there is a sequence of recent postings
you haven't received, you'll know you aren't on the list anymore.  At
least not effectively.  Some mail servera apparently handle mail for
inactive or non-functional accounts by discarding it rather than
complaining to the sender.  We have several subscribers whose addresses
are probably inactive even though I'm not getting any complaints from
their mail servers.  One recipient I am fairly certain is deceased.  But
maybe still reading email?  I leave his subscription up as a memorial and
just in case.

In some cases you may have received some recent postings, but not all.
This is because some of you let your mail boxes get full, so that
additional material is not accepted.  I usually don't delete someone
immediately when I get a message like that.  I don't delete people
immediately when I get messages about servers not responding, etc.,
either.  So, if the problem resolves itself and a mailbox starts working
again you keep your subscription, but lose some intervening mail.  After
an indefinite period - a week or two - I do delete problem subscriptions
in order to shut off the flow of complaining messages from their mail
servers, so you can deactivate your subscription this way, perhaps without
meaning to.

One other class of problem that occurs especially with University people
is that a person subscribes through one particular machine and later
discovers that though they are receiving mail, they can't post from the
machine they currently use.  Let me know and I'll fix this for you.
Sometimes Universities also reform their address schemes in ways that have
the same effect.  You can only post if your current address is identical
to the one you subscribed from.

JEK