[Mailman-Developers] AOL's requirements for spam complaints

[Carson Gaspar]

--On Friday, January 30, 2004 08:52:05 -0500 Kevin McCann 
<kmccann at bellanet.org> wrote:

> Why is it, then, that Lyris can send personalized messages to lists with
> hundreds of thousands of members with no problem?  I don't personally

If you'd read your own thread, you'd know the answer already. Lyris is its 
own MTA - it speaks SMTP directly to the recipients' mail servers. This 
allows it to do on-the-fly customization at SMTP transmit time instead of 
having to queue each unique message.

This is _very_ _hard_ to get right, just to do SMTP properly. 
Personalization makes it even more difficult. Simple example: someones mail 
server is down. Do you:

- queue the personalized message
- queue the message template, and the list of undelivered recipients
- queue the message template, the list of undelivered recipients, and the 
substitution db version

Each choice has significant implications. None is obviously correct.

It would be great if MTAs included this functionality, but there are major 
political players who are terrified this will just be used by spammers. 
Personally, I think spammers could do it trivially already, as they don't 
care about queueing mail properly and handling all the edge cases for SMTP. 
But I'm not the maintainer of postfix/exim/sendmail/etc., so it's not my 
decision.

I'll make you a deal - you write the MTA, and I'll add support in mailman 
to offload the personalization.

-- 
Carson