[Mailman-Users] Who authored the message?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Natu writes:

 > One difference between my method and yours is that my mail logs
 > will show that somebody actually replied to that address where as
 > with yours the reply would stop at the senders SMTP server.  Not
 > that significant, but it might be useful to know if users are using
 > those addresses.

If you want that information you might as well run the forwarding
service.  You're imposing what may be significant costs for non-
technical users, who are likely to be confused by the fact that your
server at rjl.com is responding to a message they sent to aol.com.

 > I could add something that will make it clear that the addresses is
 > not emailable, though my sense is that most users would get that
 > the way it is, especially if they tried to email it and it failed.

But the percentage of AOL and Yahoo! users who would understand is
likely to be much lower, if not a small minority.  People use those
services *because* they don't want to learn about email, they just
want it to work.  And the posters are likely to get upset if you make
it hard for them to receive personal replies; a send -- DSN -- resend
cycle may take a long time (especially if the sender has to ask
technical support "WTF?" :-/ )

I thank my lucky star that almost none of my users use those domains,
and so far 100% of those that do have thanked me for explaining the
problem and switched to posting from GMail or whatever.

Steve