[Mailman-Developers] Maybe you guys can help me

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 4 May 2004 10:48:16 -0700 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui at plaidworks.com> wrote:
> On May 4, 2004, at 10:38 AM, Bob Puff at NLE wrote:

> Which ties back to the original problem. Those "warning"
> not-really-bounces are anachronisms of the days when all this was tied
> to UUCP. 

Good point.

> 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".

I'm generally of the mind that my responsibility as list admin is to
deliver an SMTP packet stream containing the mail to one of their MXes.
Once I've done that my job is done.  What they decide to do from there
is their problem, and if their choices annoy me it may reflect on my
willingness to keep trying to deliver messages to them.  TANSTAAFL.
Non-conformant bounces and DSNs are annoying choices, intentional or
otherwise.  At some point this fact needs to be faced.

> 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.

cf Usenet death penalty.

> 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. 

I've a minor tendency to whack entire domains that abuse the abuse@
line.

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

Quite.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.