ietf-822
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Re: IETF Draft: Good Mailing List Behaviour

1999-03-11 17:13:53
Jacob Palme writes:
- Members only:     Only members are allowed to submit to the list

This causes huge problems with sublists, newsgroups, multiple accounts,
crossposted discussions, and other situations where a reader isn't
necessarily a subscriber.

(1) Add a "Received:" header to all messages passing the list. If a
    mailing list recognizes its own "Received:" header in an incoming
    message, such a message is dropped.

In practice, people use fields that are easier to parse than Received,
notably X-Loop and Delivered-To.

No non-delivery notification
    should be sent in this case (since it might cause another loop).

Hiding loops is a horrible idea. Bouncing will never cause a loop if
it's done correctly; see http://pobox.com/~djb/proto/mailloops.txt for
details.

(2) Store a data base of the Message-ID-s of messages which have
    passed the list, and reject incoming messages whose Message-ID
    is on this list.

As noted in http://pobox.com/~djb/proto/immhf/thread.html, such uses of
Message-ID are neither secure nor reliable.

Apart from what is specifed in sections 8. Loop Control and 9. List
Headers, a mailing list expander should not in any way modify the
heading of a message.

This is astoundingly shortsighted.

---Dan

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