Housekeeping – Lifetime Expiry Tuning

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House Keeping Lifetime

Housekeeping aims to keep the BBS clean and easy to navigate for users by pruning messages that are no longer useful.

Some example scenarios:

  • Messages that are only applicable for their audience on the day they are sent
    • Daily solar forecast, 1 day expiry.
    • Daily Earthquake Alert & WX bulletins, 1 day expiry
    • Daily propagation forecasts, 1 day expiry.
  • Messages sent by the SYSTEM or IMPORT user
    • Special BBS users that generate mail that can often clog up a system can be pruned on the day they are generated by using 0 day expiry.
  • Your BBS may be configured to service/route wormhole-traversing-mail for a geographical region that is “out of scope” for your own BBS
    • 1 day expiry is enough for mine to have forwarded @USA bulletins to my American partners.

To keep the “LC” list appetisingly short, concise and useful for users, I have shared my own override settings that maintains a manageable active message count of approximately 250-300 messages at any one time.

ALERTS: BID Lifetime

Make sure your BID lifetime is way longer than anyone else’s retention period.

You can be peered with someone who keeps absolutely every message like an archivist, rather than be a functional BBS so you can run the risk of being absolutely hammered with expired messages, this in turn will set off thousands of SYSTEM alert mails.

Keeping the BID database aware of all of the stuff it has seen pass through the system before will let it keep an eye on those messages and reject them before they come in.

Personals
Read30 days
Unread30 days
Forwarded30 days
Unforwarded30 days
Bulletins
Forwarded21 days
Unforwarded21 days
NTS*
Delivered30 days*
Forwarded30 days*
Unforwarded30 days*
* My BBS does not handle NTS so these settings are default.

Default Overrides

Here are the expiry time overrides for bulletins on PE1RRR systems

FROM

SYSTEM, 0
IMPORT, 0

TO

ALERT, 1
SOLAR, 1
EQUAKE, 1
HUMOR, 1
WEER, 1
WX, 1
TODAY, 1
FBBLOG, 1
PROP, 1
PROPA, 1
KEP, 6
KEPS, 6
TECH, 6
TECHNI, 6
LINUX, 6
PIC, 6
DXNEWS, 14
NOTS, 14
NEWS, 14
AGCW, 14
LETTER, 14
BCAST, 14
SYSOP, 30

AT

GBR, 1
USA, 1
NOAM, 1
NA, 1