[Mailman-Developers] before next release: disable backscatterin default installation

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 26 March 2008 05:18:44 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" 
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Eino Tuominen writes:
>
>  > You are missing the point. Of course you can inform of a delivery
>  > problem, but only when you really need to do it. Every organisation
>  > should know of every recipient within their authority. You should know
>  > the recipient if you accept a message for delivery from outside your
> domain.
>
> Says who?  There is nothing in the standards that says so.  And if you
> take that seriously, you have to disable .forward and procmail for
> individual users, as well as refuse to allow open subscription mailing
> lists and the like.  This may make sense in the U.S. Army and in
> corporations with a military authority structure, but it does not in
> most universities, research, or open communities.

No, that's not true. I have about 10,000 users here. They have access to 
.forward files, but only a handful have worked out how to use them. 
Actually, we let them set auto-replies but only after the email has passed 
a very strict spamassassin threshold, and its rate limited, and its only 
for personal email (To and CC: recipents, no list headers, etc).

We do have open subscription mailing lists.

What we don't do is bounce emails with bad recipient addresses.


> That is *not* the way Internet mail is designed to work.  Mail, like
> every other application on the Internet, is intended to be
> decentralized.  It is designed to allow load-sharing by use of
> intermediate and/or secondary MXes to handle primary crashes or
> overloads.

Yes, but they need to have equal access to user databases.

-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
x3148