On this the tenth year this site has been running I suspect it might be in order to explain how, why and why this site is here.

Somewhere around 1996 I bought a 1970 280SE, Euro car with a sunroof. It wasn't a particularly good example but it was stupid cheap and I figured I'd find out what this "car with a star on the hood" marque was all about. Right away I found out parts were, um, "an issue". So I started a list of parts vendors on my webserver. It soon followed that anytime I did anything to the car I'd write it up and put it on this little website. This was originally vrx.net/mbz. About a year later it escalated into mbz.vrx.net then on Jan 4, 1998 I registered mbz.org and moved everything there.

At that point in time I was running a bunch of mailing lists for tropical fish and DNS policy and technical junk, so it seemed natural to create one for Mercedes, too, thus the 108 list was born. At the time there were the only two Mercedes mailing lists - the 108 list and the "Realtime" list (named for the server, not it's performance which was at times anything but "realtime").

The only other MB mailing list was the "Realtime" list Dave Lefabvre ran. Shortly thereafter the "vets" list came up run by Alex Gabard in Switzerland. Next the Ritter/Eastly list came up and a bunch of us joined and got summarily turfed. This led to the creation of a whole bunch of mailing lists here on mbz.org on a variety of Mercedes topics.

These lists died a horrible death when a (now ex) errant employee went quite insane and trashed all my servers and ten years of data. The system had been unreliable under his aegis and new servers were deployed in Boston. As of this writing these new servers have been up for 18 months and have not even hiccuped; Yahoo has had more downtime than my new servers.

Spam has ruined more than just your and my personal email. My old accounts get 4000 spams a day and are unusable. There is no such thing as a 100% reliable spam filter - either you're going to miss messages intended for you or you're still going to get spam. This and the now-ex-errant employee caused the death of the lists, but as we speak - or as I type this, the lists are being brought back to life.

Richard Sexton
Feb 2007