LINGUIST List 8.424

Fri Mar 28 1997

All: Important Message to Subscribers

Editor for this issue: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar <aristarlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. The LINGUIST List, Important Message to Subscribers

Dear List Members:

As some of you have no doubt already learned, LINGUIST is experiencing
a software problem which is harming our ability to distribute mail
effectively to the linguistic community. Consequently, we are posting
this explanation and a request for your patience.

We have been in place at Texas A&M University for the last seven
years, and this university has generously allowed its facilities to be
used to distribute our LINGUIST mail. In January of this year,
however, because of budgetary constraints, it was decided to move all
lists at Texas A&M to a new machine. This new machine proved
incapable of handling the volume of mail which LINGUIST typically
produces, and as a result, every so often, some LINGUIST messages sent
to a few subscribers have no contents when they are received. We
should note, parenthetically, that this problem is not affecting those
who read LINGUIST on the Web: all our issues are available in full at
any of our Web sites.

We've been patiently awaiting a solution to this problem, but have now
begun to fear that a solution may not be forthcoming. Because of
this, we've come to a reluctant conclusion: we may have to move
LINGUIST to another site.

Now, we have two choices in this situation. We could set up our own
mail-delivery system on our own, private machine. But this would
entail our buying a fast Pentium-based machine with a great deal of
memory, and the software licenses for the operating system and the
mail-delivery system: Windows NT, Listserv, and a mail-transfer
program called LSMTP. This would probably cost us about $8000 in all;
and, unfortunately, as you are probably aware, one thing LINGUIST does
not have is money.

Our second option is to move to a site at another university or
company. At the moment, we are investigating this possibility. If
you feel that a site you know if would be willing to give us space and
capacity, we'd be very glad to hear from you.

We'll keep you informed as things progress. And if any of you, our
subscribers, have suggestions, we would be happy to hear them.

Anthony, Helen and Daniel