MailBITS/01-Mar-93

As many of you found out yesterday, the LISTSERV is busy sending out its renewal notices to weed out unused accounts. I didn't realize, in my original posting, that the Reply-To address would be set to an address that bounced directly to me. Thus replying to the renewal letter WILL NOT WORK (and I'll get swamped with email).

To renew your subscription to our mailing list when the LISTSERV asks you to, send email to:

LISTSERV@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU

with this line in the body of the mailfile:

CONFIRM TIDBITS

One other note. Several people have sent the CONFIRM TIDBITS mailfile correctly, only to discover that the LISTSERV claims they aren't on the list. I see two possibilities here. The most likely is that your email address appears differently in your header information than it does in the LISTSERV's list - thus the two don't match and the LISTSERV thinks you aren't who you say. In this instance, I recommend letting the old subscription lapse and subscribe again from your current account. Send

SUBSCRIBE TIDBITS your full name

to the same LISTSERV address listed above. The second possibility is that you receive TidBITS from a local distribution list, and we haven't configured that list in such a way that it doesn't need to renew. If you're the list administrator, send me email and I'll fix that for local distribution lists. I've already asked the estimable Mark Williamson at Rice (he's the LISTSERV guru there) to fix the local mailing lists that were in this last batch.

TidBITS Discussions! -- Feedback on articles continues unabated, which is great because we at TidBITS benefit from the ideas, stories, and suggestions. However, it's not so great in the sense that I'm becoming overloaded and nobody else gets to read the discussions. We would all be better served if much of the thought generated by TidBITS went to discussion groups, rather than to only me. That way more people can read ideas and respond to them, creating healthy discussion. As such, I encourage you to send letters to discussion areas I frequent, since then I will possibly reply to and use your messages, but others can benefit as well.

The best places to continue discussion of issues raised in TidBITS include: the Info-Mac digest, and its mirror on Usenet, comp.sys.mac.digest; the TidBITS section on CompuServe; the MacWEEK and MacUser forums on ZiffNet/Mac (especially appropriate if the topic has also been raised in either of those magazines); the TidBITS Announcements folder in the Macintosh Hardware Forum on America Online; and the mac.hack/tidbits area on BIX. Thanks for thinking about our articles!