On 2004-10-01 12:13, Laird Breyer wrote:
From the point of view of a non-member of the list, who just wants to
send a single message without subscribing, the list server can have the
following default behaviour:
1) if a new list message is a direct reply to the non-member's email, it
should be forwarded to his address, possibly with instructions on
how to disable this feature if he wishes.
I did not understand this option.
First of all, is the non-member's email to the list accepted or refused?
You assume that it is always accepted, since otherwise nobody could reply
to him!?
The first default behavior on acceptin a non-member's email could be
1) ignore
2) refuse
3) return some handling instructions
4) let the message be administrated
5) accept by reply handling
6) accept by spam filtering
7) accept everything
1), just ignore should be discouraged
2) refuse is very reasonable and a default behavior on most lists
3) handling instructions is part of a refuse message, most of the time.
The typical answer is 'you must be a subscribed member'.
However, a better method might be to return a 'one time license':
"If you really want to send your message to the list, please do it once
again, but add the first line 'non-member-posting: 123456' to your
message"
Or e.g. send the message e.g. to 'list-approved-<number>@listserver' once
again which will accept the message for 48 hours to send it to the list
4) admin - another typical behavior is that non-members' messages are
forwarded to the list admin who can approve and forward them to the list.
5) external messages could be accepted as long as they are a reply on a
message that passed the list within e.g. the last four weeks
Here Laird's option may jump in so that a list reply to a member's message
could be sent to this list member only, instead of the full list. Thus
this member could administrate whether he would like to forward the
non-member message to the list. However, this may cause plenty of other
problems, e.g. that
* the list member guessed that everyone else had received this message as well
* the non-member did not expect a forward to the list
* the non-member actually is a member. He sees that his message did not
make it to the list and resends it, this time as a member
6) external messages could be verified by rigid spam filters that let pass
well-behaved messages only
7) ... accept just every spam who might pass through. Still a very common
behavior, as long as it's an unknown, unarchived list where spam adress
lists don't know the name.
Regards
Martin