[Mailman-Users] Digest members of one domain marked bouncing

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Peter Shute writes:

 > We mostly have the Plain option ticked. Is that RFC 934? And
 > unticked is Mime?

Yes and yes.

 > I’ll try contacting bigpond, but as a non customer, I suspect I’ll be
 > ignored at best.

True, but you're in a lot better position vis-a-vis petulant bigpond
customers if you can say "I care, and have done what I can.  I'm sorry
that it's not enough.  Your provider evidently doesn't care; they
won't even answer my mail asking what else I can do."

 > I suspect many tech support people think the same way.

It's not hard to understand why.  If spam gets through, they're the
last line of defense, they *should* catch it.  After all, the user
recognized it as spam from a single summary line!  If wanted mail
doesn't get through, first of all, the user may not even notice.  If
they do, you can claim it never got to your system.  If they get the
bounce or a SMTP log from the other side proving it was a spam reject,
you can blame the author or mailing list for doing the same things
that spammers do (even if they're entirely reasonable and explicitly
provided for by the relevant RFCs -- nobody reads RFCs).

Many admins end up convincing themselves that they're doing a good job
by worrying more about keeping spam out than by ensuring that legit
mail gets through, and only then preventing spam.  Even using that
approach, they probably get more complaints about spam than they do
about lost mail. :-(



-- 
Associate Professor              Division of Policy and Planning Science
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/     Faculty of Systems and Information
Email: turnbull at sk.tsukuba.ac.jp                   University of Tsukuba
Tel: 029-853-5175                 Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN