[OS X TeX] away from my mail

[Victor Ivrii]

>
> The fun of academic life -- though not as fun as in David Lodge's
> books, certainly!

Few years ago some very respected math department decided to
acknowledge the receipt of the recommendation letters to their authors
automatically and the system administrator could invent nothing better
than to do it with the list server and in the list all the referees
for all applicants were included, so every referee got an
acknowledgement  for every other referee (and for completely different
job seekers). First of all, this is supposed to be confidential.

Second, the reaction of my esteemed colleagues was more censored:
"Would be it possible to explain why we are getting all this
information?" and all the responses were distributed too. Clearly
without AR the process was more limited but enthusiam of my colleagues
(majority of whom have a great expertise in math but are not very
computer savvy :-) supported it.

Actually in the absence of administrator there is an easy remedy for
the infinite loop: unsubscribe the guilty party spoofing his/her email
address.

I wonder what happens if two list-servers are mutually subscribed but
never found two which I hated enough for such experiment :-)

>


--
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Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
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