Since I have received no less than eight notes of this nature so far, I'm
forwarding one of the responses to the list so people will stop mailing
me...presumably they have fanfiction to discuss, maybe this'll let 'em get
back to it.  :)

For reference, 'mirror' software is intended to take a mailing list and
feed it into some sort of local storage accessable by multiple users.  An
example would be something that takes a mailing list and feeds it into a
publically accessable MIME folder using Cyrus, or that takes a mailing
list and feeds it into a newsgroup on a local server (as this package
tried to do).  Such a method is good for two main reasons; 1) it cuts down
on the outgoing mail from the mailing list site (many mail servers are not
bright enough to know that they could connect to 'domain.com' just once
for all the people at 'domain.com' instead of once for each) by
eliminating all but one subscriber address for a domain, and 2) it cuts
down on the amount of disk space used on the destination site, since you
don't have multiple people with copies of the same message in their
mailbox.

As a side note, the mirroring software I tried to use was busted beyond
belief, so I gave up the idea and figure I'll just live with it clogging
up maison-o... it can handle the bandwidth, it would've just been nice to
clear it out of the user's mailboxes and cut down on the duplicated drive
space used up.  Since the alternatives are either try to fix someone
else's busted software (which I don't particularly want to do) or write my
own (which I don't have the time to do since I'm writing/maintaining a
mailing list package).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 01:47:24 -0800 (PST)
From: Jeremy Blackman <loki@maison-otaku.net>
To: The Eternal Lost Lurker <EternalLostLurker@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: [FFML] Message 1

On Sun, 29 Mar 1998, The Eternal Lost Lurker wrote:

Message to make the group active. :)

Test messages are specifically a no-no in the FAQ...

To clarify; I was trying to set up a mirror to subscribe to the FFML (like
the one on thekeep.org used to be) so that the eight or so people who use
maison-otaku.net who subscribe to the FFML wouldn't all have messages
coming in from it (and clogging up the mail and duplicating and taking a
lot of disk space).  Since thekeep.org no longer runs Cyrus, and thus no
longer has the 'lists.fanfic' Cyrus folder, I was attempting to create a
similar 'mirror' using innd.  The wrong config file got copied over, and
so when I sent a mail to 'ffml-feed' it went to fanfic@fanfic.com instead.
:P