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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ian Eiloart writes:

 > No, that's not true. I have about 10,000 users here.

Interesting.  I bet we're talking hundreds of thousands of users, just
with the three or four of you medium-to-large-site admins that have
posted so far.  At a penny per user, I'm sure you could find somebody
to do this work.  I know I would do it (but you surely could find
somebody cheaper and better-qualified ;-).

 > > 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.

I ask, where are these requirements written?  I've been reading the
Mailman lists for years.  I know that you guys want the autoresponders
configurable.  However, often enough they've been presented as YAGNI,
not a bug, and this is the first time I've heard a demand that they be
shut off by default.  Obviously you guys hang out together in some Big
Site Cabal, but what is common knowledge to you is not necessarily
something that volunteer part-time developers are going to have easy
access to.

BTW, that's not how I understand a secondary as a practical matter.
Effectively, that is a distributed primary.  (I bet your "secondary"
MXes deliver directly to user mailboxes, which are a shared resource
like the user database.  No?)  Among other things, for most small-
scale operations, the user database lives on the same host as the
primary's MTA.  If it is down, then under that requirement so are any
secondaries.