[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Plain Text Only

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 1/6/02 2:35 AM, "Marc MERLIN" <marc_news@vasoftware.com> wrote:

>> of our websites, our upstream providers get anonymous complaints about
>> "spamvertised website".  They then waste their time relaying these

> I receive abuse@sourceforge.net, so I'm very familiar with those too :-(

I hate to say it, but I effectively blackhole spamcop stuff. It's pretty
useless to me as a postmaster of large mail list systems. I got tired of
people using it as a tool to unsubscribe from mail lists because they're too
lazy to read the instructions in the message, and since spamcop hides all
useful data in the message they send to me, I toss them.

On the other hand, my favorite problem with this stuff is the time I ended
up on the MAPs blackhole for hosting spam. It turned out that a subscriber
to one of my mail lists (one with e-mail confirmation, I'll note) happened
to be on a site that MAPs used an automated sniffer to find spam, and
someone on that mail list sent out a message dsiscussing what she was going
to do on vacation, and the MAPs sniffer decided it was a "you won a free
vacation" spam, and wrote me up. So I got blackholed because two subscribers
sent a legitimate piece of email to each other that was appropriate for the
list they were on. Eventually, after having a discussion with Dave Rand, he
figured out what was happening and promised to whitelist my site from
further annoyance by the MAPs servers (what finally got me honked was that
MAPs was testing my site for open relays about once a week. It turned out
that the mail sent to my subscriber on that MAPs sniffer site was having the
mail reported as spam or open relay about that often, and was actually
losing a significant chunk of email to this "spam blocker"). They did
whitelist me, for about three weeks, then the relay checks started again. At
that time, I told my subscribers to move or get off the list (they moved),
and put blocks up to prevent MAPs from contacting my server without
permission, since I considered by that time their repeated scans an attack
on my server. 

So if you see me make comments about how I'm not a big fan of these
blackhole systems, there are any number of reasons. This is just one of
them.