Re: Who are these folks?
Re: Who are these folks?
- Subject: Re: Who are these folks?
- From: John W Baxter <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 22:27:08 -0700
At 17:10 -0700 9/22/2001, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
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The mailing list forwards our messages on to all the list recipients. Don't
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forget that the AS-Users list, unusually among mailing lists, replies by
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default to the real sender, not to the mailing list. The sender's email
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address is the Reply-To address. Those of us with Outlook Express or
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Entourage can override that with the Mailing List Manager, so we forget all
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about it. Maybe Eudora can do something similar if you set some special
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preference. Everyone else has to remember it; that's why you often see
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people replying to the list AND the sender - it's easier for them just to
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click Reply All.
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>
So these guys' server mailboxes - the space they've allotted or paid for -
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on their ISP's or company's mail server is full: either they leave their
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messages on the server or they're on holiday. The ISP bounces the mail back
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to the sender (you personally, rather than the list), saying in effect
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"Sorry, try again another day if you want, and maybe he'll have cleared out
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his mailbox by then. It's full up now and this message can't be delivered."
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You'll only get these if you write to the list, of course. I'm glad for once
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that AS-Users works this way - otherwise the list - all of us -would get
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two of these for every singe message (or digests) these guys receive.
The two ISPs (or companies) use mail servers (probably, based on the
message wording, the same program) which do not bounce messages correctly.
Bounces should go the the envelope sender (which doesn't appear in any of
the message headers on the wire, but in the figurative "envelope").
We happen to use an SMTP server which is configured to show the envelope
sender in this header which it adds when it delivers a message:
Return-path: <email@hidden>
[it comes from the SMTP protocol's "MAIL FROM: xxx" command].
The Mailman list server also sets this header in the outgoing messages
Errors-To: email@hidden
but it is apparently not wrong to ignore that, unfortunately...it has been
deprecated.
If the list's replies were set to go to the list, the two problem
subscribers would have their messages go back to the list...in many forms
of mailing list software, that can lead to loops when the bounce goes out
and gets bounced and comes back and goes out and gets bounced... [Those
loops can also happen when people write their own "vacation" scripts.]
Mailman's
X-BeenThere: email@hidden
header is supposed to break those loops, and it does a pretty good job.
But it fails with some SMTP servers which not only bounce to the wrong
address but also strip out that header. Sigh!
Other modern list software uses similar mechanisms.
When bounces go back to the right address, the Mailman software interprets
them, and--depending on the configuration--automatically sets the address
not to receive mail and notifies the list administrator. [Each action is
optional, independently, in the list's configuration, as are the number of
bounces considered to be "too many" and the minimum time period over which
bounces are tolerated.] The list members never see those.
--John
--
John Baxter email@hidden Port Ludlow, WA, USA