On 5/26/06, Christopher Adams adamsca@gmail.com wrote:

I agree in part. My site hosts over 500 lists and has about 100,000 subscribers. By default, all new lists are set to Reject messages from "non-members" and sends them a message indicating that either their address has changed, they are sending from a different account, or they really aren't a member. Normally, I would think that simply discarding messages from "non-members" would be the best tactic. However, there were some situations with management on my own staff where a list owner subscribed an email address alias for someone in management. Since the alias was not the actual address that they were sending from, the message was discarded without any alert to the sender, so she assumed it was sent.

On occasion, when I know there are problems with address aliases, I just add the non-subscribed alias as a non-member that can post, or as a subscriber set to 'no mail'. But, for so many lists and subscribers, there is the potential for problems with other lists. So, I set the default, let the list owners modify it if they like, and deal with the bandwidth issue and the fact that the system is actually making a contact with the address, many which are forged.

On 5/25/06, Peter C.S. Adams peter.adams@umb.edu wrote:

...

Thus spake Brad Knowles brad@stop.mail-abuse.org, circa 5/25/2006 9:54 AM:

...

Generally speaking, the recommended solution is to automatically reject such messages -- which informs the sender, and allows them to take appropriate action.

In the old days, this was certainly true, but today, when 70-80% of all emails on the internet are spam, you may easily find that rejecting all those messages will (a) eat up a lot of your internet bandwidth, and (b)

exacerbate the problem by telling the "sender" of the message -- which will, 90% of the time, be a forged address -- that "their" mail was rejected.

I have a handful of lists set to "reject," but most are set to discard. In my opinion, the poster should be subscribed to the list and set to receive mail; otherwise they should have no expectation that their message was distributed.

 peter

-- Peter C.S. Adams Director of Information and Communication Technologies College of Public and Community Service, UMass Boston "Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none." -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

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