[Mailman-Users] A funny thing happened while usingmail man.

[Mark Sapiro]

Brad Knowles wrote:

>At 1:43 PM -0500 2005-03-31, ICHRONSTUDIO at aol.com wrote:
>
>>  I now know how to set it up as announce only.  I even know how to put  my
>>  database on with out sending out a thank you for subscribing mail.  How  do I
>>  stop the continuing replies?
>
>	Well, that depends on how they're doing the continuing replies. 
>If all those people are doing "Reply-All", then most of them are 
>being sent directly from each person to each other person who was 
>named in the previous message to which someone did a "Reply-All", and 
>since none of that passes through your machines, there's not much you 
>can do.
>
>	Anything passing through your machines should be passing through 
>your lists, and if you've got the list configurations set up 
>correctly now, they should already be stopped.

One other thing to consider is you may still have some number of old
outgoing messages queued in your MTA since it may well have been way
overloaded at some point You could investigate how to delete those
queued messages before they're sent, but that's beyond the scope of
this list.


>>  Sorry to bother you about this, it was my own ignorance that put me here,
>>  but I was hoping that you might be able to suggest sometihng to get me  out.
>
>	In my experience, one general rule is that when you add a bunch 
>of people to a list and you don't send out an announcement welcoming 
>them to the list, and large numbers of people start immediately 
>responding with "STOP SENDING ME E-MAIL" complaints, etc.... that 
>means you're basically sending spam, and that makes you a spammer.


This is generally true, but in many cases, it's only one or two people
who initially respond and most of the subsequent mess is people
responding "Don't tell me to stop sending you mail. I didn't send you
anything. now you stop sending me mail."


>	In the future, if you don't want to be lumped in with that class 
>of person, I would encourage you to do things differently so that 
>your activities do not encourage those people to respond that way.


Agreed.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan