[Mailman-Developers] Fwd: suggested improvement for Mailman's bounce processing

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Aug 15, 2006, at 1:59 AM, John W. Baxter wrote:

> On 8/14/06 5:42 AM, "Barry Warsaw" <barry at python.org> wrote:
>
>> Today, held messages still have to be approved by the moderator.
>> What I propose is to allow posters to self-moderate, simply by
>> verifying that their address is real.  This probably means a
>> clickable link and (maybe) a header cookie for replying.  Think
>> Gmane's auto-moderation approach.
>
> Unfortunately, the would-be posters then have to be notified of the  
> message
> status.  Thus, while you're reducing moderator workload, the  
> backscatter
> problem isn't solved.

But I think it can be mitigated.  You simply don't send a  
verification for every posting your holding.  Maybe you send a  
summary every three days until the messages expire unverified.

> So an integrated MTA/MLM would be hard to write (it wouldn't need  
> all the
> bells and whistles of a full MTA, and would simplify some of the MUA's
> problems, so the difficulty is probably less than the sum of the
> difficulties, but still probably more than either alone).  (And a
> newly-written thing doing SMTP would be insecure.)

Mailman won't be that integrated MTA/MLM, although it may have tools  
that help integrate Mailman with the most popular MTAs.  I have a  
clear picture of what I see Mailman doing and it's not the MTAs job  
or SpamAssassin's job.  It's only barely doing Hypermail's job (and  
that's debatable).

> So aside from ruining email, the spammers have ruined email mailing  
> lists.
> Perhaps irretrievably (at my age of 67, certainly irretrievably in my
> working lifetime).
>
> None of which means it shouldn't be tried, although perhaps it  
> should be
> tried in the world of whatever comes along to provide a working  
> replacement
> for SMTP.

I tend to be more sanguine about things.  I'm younger than you but  
I've been around for long enough to have heard about the death of the  
internet/arpanet for 25 years.  It hasn't happened yet and I don't  
think email and SMTP is going away any time soon.  Maybe it should.   
Maybe all the kids will gravitate toward other modes of communication  
and leave us dinosaurs to our spam riddled 20th century telegraphs.   
Or maybe we'll stay just barely ahead of the spammers enough to eek  
out the benefits of email and mailing lists for another 20 years.

- -Barry

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