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Stephen,
On Mar 2, 2006, at 9:48 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
"Harold" == Harold Paulson <haroldp@sierraweb.com> writes:
Harold> Do you really have a *policy* to accept messages that you Harold> will never deliver, save them to disk, and then generate Harold> reject messages for them?As I read his post, indeed he does. He wants legitimate posters to be told they need to sign up for the list before they can post. It's true that you can supply a reason for an MTA rejection, but (in my experience) it is unfortunately also true that many originating MTAs are not configured to report that reason. Others will substitute a stock text for the numerical code (especially in cases of internationalization). The most reliable way to give those legitimate users full information is for Mailman to create and send a bounce mail.
Ah, this is a good criticism: other MTA's bounce messages can't be
trusted to be readable by the sender. Mailman after all, is sending
a notice, not exactly generating a bounce. A better policy-server
might greylist non-member senders. 95% of the spammers will go
away. All of the normal posts would go right through. Members who
send from the wrong account would get the usual Mailman notice.
Occasionally wrong-account-posters would have to wait a long time on
their notice.
Because of the specific issue with Yahoo, he "deeply regrets that we must make a special exception for Yahoo."
When implementing that policy exception for Yahoo, it would make sense to do so at the MTA level, as you suggest, if his MTA provides the hooks and he can write the needed glue code. (It's a bit much to call that exercise "configuration", IMO.)
Yeah, I just bristle at a hack for one destination based solely on
it's size, when this is a general problem. It could be that other
ISPs blacklist servers based on the ratio of valid:invalid addresses
that you send their way (AOL does this). We just notice Yahoo or AOL
because they are big, and our phones start ringing when they
blacklist us.
This treats a symptom, not the problem.
The problem is that we are making net.messes by automatically
replying to junk. It would be nice to see a general fix.
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