One of the benefits of the suggestion to use the regular posting
mechanism is that it means that the MUA already knows how to post a
message. It does not need the IP Address of a server to post two.
However, it assumes that the path for outgoing mail is related to the
path for incoming mail. I, for example, occasionally get mail from
people whose incoming mail path has nothing, as far as I can see, to do
with their outgoing mail path except for sharing a human at the end of
them. This is most visible when the person's address is at a mail
provider I don't accept any mail from, thus making it obvious the two
paths differ (because I wouldn't've gotten it if they didn't); I'm sure
there are lots more cases which I don't notice.
If the two paths are not related, then sending something to the
outgoing mail path won't have any effect on incoming mail handling.
Also, everyone's talking about POP and IMAP as if they were all there
is. What about cases where the user's mailbox is accessed other ways?
Are they rare enough that we (FWVO "we") don't care about them? As
sane as that often is, in this case I suspect it might not be, because
I suspect that being unusual in that respect and being a comparatively
valuable spam (and unwanted ham) reporter correlate positively, because
each of them correlates relatively strongly with being an
email-competent geek. (This is admittedly a relatively baseless
suspicion; does anyone have any evidence bearing on its accuracy?)
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