[Mailman-Users] Training Mailman to find email address from NDR

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Grant Taylor via Mailman-Users writes:

 > RFC 3464 has been out for 17 years.  I think it's past time that we
 > stop coddling people that can't conform to it.

It's not a matter of coddling nonconformers.  The only thing we are
likely to be able to do about them is "Sleeping Giants" them on
hostmaster Twitter.

The only thing that would really hurt the nonconformers is to put them
out the airlock.  But that would hurt *our* users first, fast, and hard.
Only if it became a movement would the large providers even notice.

I know, you know that already.  But a lot of the folks on this list
may not.  The fact of the matter is that the troublesome miscreants
(Yahoo![1], AOL, Sendgrid) are large, they have lots of "captive" end
users who would be very unhappy if any service they use took strong
action to prevent arrival of nonconformant mail from those sources,
and *our* clients are the list owners, postmasters, and hostmasters
who manage sites and lists for those end users.

AFAICS we're stuck in a position where the people who do the work have
to make a decision whether doing the work is worth it for the project.
Mark's been doing this a long time, nobody is more expert on that for
Mailman 2.  I support his decision:  however much I'd like to make
things a little bit easier for the list owners, his judgment is better
than mine (and I don't know how to do it myself -- learning how would
mean a lot more work than it would take for Mark! :-( )

Steve


Footnotes: 
[1]  I no longer blame Yahoo! and AOL for "p=reject" given that they
were exposed to unimaginably large spam campaigns based on hundreds of
millions of leaked address books used to spearphish spam and phishing
messages at their users' correspondents.  The alternative would have
been to shut down their mail systems entirely, which would have hurt
nearly a billion people directly, not to mention their correspondents.  
Something needs to be done about making firms with large stocks of PII
accountable for leaking any of it, though, up to and including
corporate death on the auction block if it's big enough.

-- 
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