-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- A lesson in stupidity. - -rich [Forwards from impeccable intermediate sources snipped; if you REALLY need to confirm, mail me.] - ------- Forwarded Message OK. I used to work in the MIS department of Houghton Mifflin, and still am good friends with the upper MIS people. In fact I had dinner with them last night. Although the promotion is/was real, PLEASE DON'T SEND THEM ANY MORE EMAIL. The mail gateway is throttling with the incoming mail - we had a long talk last night over how to aleviate this problem. They've gotten alittle over 100k messages in 1 week. The mail server is currently a SPARC 5 w/ 64MB RAM and a gigabyte of swap, and is so hosed that they're switching in an Ultra2 tonight to try to handle the load. The lesson here is: don't do a marketing ploy without first consulting your Tech people. Apparently, the whole thing was cooked up by one of the departments, who neglected to tell MIS. Also, for those of you who might possibly work in industry in the future and are looking for a way to gather email addresses or do some kind of promotion like this, USE WEB HITS. The average email coming in to HMCo is about 4kb, requires disk space, and requires a vfork() of sendmail to deliver. A typical Http hit runs less than 100bytes, is served by a threaded httpd server, and requires very little disk access. Anyway, this is just a note to please spare my friends at HMCo. The kids are going to get all the donations promised, and my friends have enough headaches. Thanks! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBMrHJDJNcNyVVy0jxAQH98wH/RA2dc5bLz3KbX0JoyVha5+XoppMSgNtB 8MvVemU5iOeBRrJTENo1bj6OYx8b7ie8E95OUsBy9Kx0RpFfpOmBSA== =QdmN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----