[Mailman-Developers] Fwd: suggested improvement for Mailman's bounce processing

[John W. Baxter]

On 8/14/06 5:42 AM, "Barry Warsaw" <barry at python.org> wrote:

> Today, held messages still have to be approved by the moderator.
> What I propose is to allow posters to self-moderate, simply by
> verifying that their address is real.  This probably means a
> clickable link and (maybe) a header cookie for replying.  Think
> Gmane's auto-moderation approach.

Unfortunately, the would-be posters then have to be notified of the message
status.  Thus, while you're reducing moderator workload, the backscatter
problem isn't solved.

Unfortunately, we know MTAs are hard to write (Exim is still evolving;
Postfix took much longer to write than the author expected; sendmail will
never be finished).  Mailing list managers are hard to write (Mailman is
still evolving).

So an integrated MTA/MLM would be hard to write (it wouldn't need all the
bells and whistles of a full MTA, and would simplify some of the MUA's
problems, so the difficulty is probably less than the sum of the
difficulties, but still probably more than either alone).  (And a
newly-written thing doing SMTP would be insecure.)

So aside from ruining email, the spammers have ruined email mailing lists.
Perhaps irretrievably (at my age of 67, certainly irretrievably in my
working lifetime).

None of which means it shouldn't be tried, although perhaps it should be
tried in the world of whatever comes along to provide a working replacement
for SMTP.

  --John