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Re: Address Confirmation Request

On Mar 31, 2004, at 4:06 PM, Greg Guerin wrote:
Most mailing-lists will drop subscribers who use such challenge/response
email filters. It's considered poor list etiquette, at the very least. It
doesn't speak too highly of the subscriber's forethought or understanding
of consequences, either.


yup. I've been working over a new policy to deal with such things. It'll show up some day, but in general, here it is:

1) when you subscribe to a mailing list, you agree to accept mail from it. All mail. Without exception. So we assume that any mail list you subscribe to will be whitelisted into the user's mailbox.

2) any system that doesn't do that and bounces messages for any reason will have those messages treated as a bounce. Generate enough bounces, you get zapped from the system.

3) if you send the message back to the poster instead of the system, that's treated as a broken mailer, which leads to immediate unsubscription. Do it twice (i.e., don't learn from the first mistake), and it can lead to that address or server being banned from accessing the list server.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been evaluating just how many "special hacks" and manual work and man-hours are being spent trying to separate the "real" bounces from the spam blocks, the vacation messages, the challenge/response stuff, the... -- you get the point. there's such a huge volume of garbage and bogus blocks and stupid virus-stoppers and bad anti-spam that it's wasting huge resources trying to "protect" users from the actions of their own stupid mail systems, which is preventing us from doing things for users who's systems actually act properly.

so the heck with it. I no longer care why an email bounces -- only that it does. If it comes back, it's a bounce. I don't care if that means your C/R system challenges it or your spam assassin blocks it; it's a bounce. And you'd be amazed at the stuff the gets bounced; things like, for instance, messages that mention the word j-v-ascr-pt in the web-development list, or messages discussing how to v-r-s protect a mail server in the OS X Server list, by spam assassin or other systems who see those messages as viruses or worms.

so -- the heck with it. If your mail server is broken,it's broken. And any mail server that's not whitelisting mail list software is broken. I'm tired of your server throwing your problems into my mailbox to solve. I'm going to treat them as bounces. Because I don't have time to parse out your mail for you any more, or the interest in trying. My way of encouraging you to FIX YOUR STUPID SPAM FILTERS. by unsubscribing you when they do stupid things, they're now your problem again, not mine.

You should send an email containing an example of the challenges to the
Java-Dev list-admin, assuming he hasn't seen and acted on the complaint
already.


Please do. those are seriously broken, and if they refuse to fix them, we will ban those domains from using the server. And since they're already broken, they odn't send the return back to the correct address, so I don't know it's happening until you tell me, or I happen to post to the list.

One would think people who write mail systems for a living (and the places that do these stupid bounces are in many cases commercial systems, not home-hacks) would know how to use the standards. So I have even less tolerance of those than I do honest mistakes... And givne how full the postmaster boxes get with this garbage -- I dont' feel bad at all getting hard-assed about this, either... Nobody seems to think (or care) what their decisions on their systems cause for anyone else any more. So I'm gonna join the club and return the favors....



--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech, Apple IS&T E-mail systems
email@hidden
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References: 
 >Re: Address Confirmation Request (From: Greg Guerin <email@hidden>)



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