[BC] May!

[Barry Mishkind]

Although I hear snow is falling in some parts of the country... we 
are starting the temperature climb out here on the desert.

But, as the month begins, let me just take a moment, as usual, to 
thank you for participating on the Broadcast list and sharing your 
experience and knowledge. It really does help a lot of people, 
especially where there are fewer and fewer engineers in a given area 
with whom to associate.

A couple of notes about the list:

1. The gmail crisis appears to be over - at least for now. The 
doubling and tripling of emails going through their servers stopped, 
WITHOUT any response to numerous attempts to communicate with them. 
(I even spoke with a few Googlers at NAB.)  For a company that 
supposedly is dedicated to doing good, communication with outside 
people is apparently not part of the company creed. We sort of get 
what we get, and we are supposed to be happy that way. Pardon me if I 
am not shouting in glee.

2. We have been having some difficulty lately with earthlink 
(mindspring). For some reason - and again, I cannot get a straight 
answer - the mailscanner at virtbiz seems to particularly hate 
earthlink, and dev nuls all email from there. Recently, I added the 
backup mailserver to oldradio.com, and in the past couple of weeks, 
it seems that earthlink email will come through - usually marked 
{Spam?} - but almost exclusively on that backup server. We continue 
to seek a solution, but the word I got was that "there is nothing 
here (Virtbiz) that would block earthlink messages." Oh well. I 
continue to pass these posts on by hand.

3. I really hate a lot of "rules" on the list. Most of those in the 
FAQ are really just common sense and courtesy.

4. At the same time, please note that any post with a subject line 
containing multiple "Re:"s or the words "Digest," "list," "Fwd:," or 
"was" normally will get held up as we try to keep posts on topic.

5. Excessive quoting is strongly discouraged. We purposely trapped a 
word from one thread this week. The original post had over a DOZEN 
replies, each quoting the entire original text, including the .sigs, 
although two or three lines would have been more than enough. More 
than a few of the replies had more .sig content than the reply 
itself.  This makes reading the Digest extremely hard for folks, who 
have to scroll two or three (or more) pages to see one line of "new" content.

	Those of you who are editing your quotes tightly are very much appreciated.

6. Recently, we had another report of someone's personal cell phone 
and other data being mined from the archives. We strongly suggest 
that when posting on a mailing list, you limit your .sig to four 
lines, including name and location, perhaps company and call, and 
maybe your main contact number. There is no reason to include your 
email address - it is in the "From:" header.


Again, we thank you for being part of the BC list - and hope you will 
invite your friends to share with us. The more minds that share, the 
better for everyone!