Discussion Forum Email Storm Explanation and Apology

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Imported from previous forum

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The webmasters of the FIX website would like to apologize for the large number of emails which subscribers of this discussion forum received today. The problem was the result of enhancements to the FIX website and one of the site’s new features, the ability to post a response to a discussion forum posting by simply replying to the notification message, went awry. The FIX website project team has since made changes eliminating the email-based reply feature.

[ For a more detailed explanation see: http://fixprotocol.org/documents/876/DiscussionForumEmailStormApology_20040906.doc ]

Please accept our apologies and thank you for your understanding.
webmaster@fixprotocol.org

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The problem was the result of enhancements to the FIX website and one of the site’s new features, the ability to post a response to a discussion forum posting by simply replying to the notification message, went awry. The FIX website project team has since made changes eliminating the email-based reply feature.

Actually I considered the reply feature as a Good Thing. Netiquette prohibits to send out-of-office replies to mailings list; as an extra counter-measure your system could filter out such unwanted replies.

So I hope removing that feature is only a temporary solution to this problem.

The most effective approach would be to provide news reader access via NNTP. In this way, you would avoid the mail-related problems altogether and provide a convenient way of access.

Cheers, Jörg

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Scott,

If you are going to have a reply by email feature, you should study or make use of existing mailing list software. The problem is that you have the forum address in the FROM field on the email message. That’s a disaster waiting to happen as you can see. What should be done is the original sender should be in the FROM field, while the list address should be in the CC field. That way any automatic responses are sent only to the original sender not the entire list.

This way when a message is received from a list, if I hit reply I can send a personal reply to the sender. If I hit reply to all, then it will go to the list as well.

–oren

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We have removed the newly introduced reply-by-mail feature. We will re-visit considering how to design and whether or not to implement such a feature in a future phase of the development of the FIX website. Thank you.