[Mailman-Developers] Maybe you guys can help me

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On May 4, 2004, at 10:38 AM, Bob Puff at NLE wrote:

>  If
> their ISP is broken enough that it generates bounce messages, then 
> their
> unsubscription problem isn't mine.

it's not always easy to convince their users of that.

Which ties back to the original problem. Those "warning" 
not-really-bounces are anachronisms of the days when all this was tied 
to UUCP. Basically, they should die. the only way you convince sites to 
fix THEIR problems is to convince their users to whine enough to make 
them care. You can't do that if you "fix the problem in Mailman" by 
making it go away. Think about what behavior your reinforcing when you 
make a change, and whether that's the behavior you want to encourage.

the same thing is happening with anti-spam and anti-virus tools, who 
seem to think they "fix" the problem by bouncing crap into everyone 
else's mailboxes. my current thought on that is:

http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001447.html

which basically boils down to "if it looks like a bounce and quacks 
like a bounce and swears like a bounce, then dammit, it's a bounce".

And the only way to make THEM fix their damned systems to not bounce 
stuff that shouldn't bounce is to make it a visible problem to them. 
You don't do that by "fixing" mailman. Unfortunately, it'll cause some 
pain for users, but my feeling is, if their stuff is bouncing and they 
odn't realize it, that's a bigger problem they SHOULD be warned about,a 
nyway.

so my policy is now simple: if you bounce it back, I'll treat it like a 
bounce. If it has the word "spam" in it anywhere, it'll be treated like 
a complaint against my server, and suffer immediate unsubscription. if 
that's not what you (the user/subscriber) wanted, then complain to YOUR 
admins, since tehy're the ones that did it. I'm just not trying to 
second-guess them any more and figure out which bounces are real, and 
which ones aren't. if they send it, they must mean it.

and I suggest Mailman as a package take that approach, if we want to 
have any hope of convincing admins to get their bleeding act together. 
Because if we wallpaper over it in the bounce processor, we give them 
no motivation to fix it, do we? and what really ought to be fixed?

Tweaking this stuff in mailman is dealing with a symptom, but not 
encouraing the real problem to be looked at.