--On Friday, 13 July, 2007 06:35 -0400 Ken Raeburn
<raeburn(_at_)MIT(_dot_)EDU> wrote:
...
So people who are SO inconsiderate that they not only send
vacation messages for messages sent to mailinglists, which
is clearly extremely undesirable behavior, but even worse,
send those messages to the LIST, should be spared all
possible inconvenience?
Certainly not. But that doesn't mean we need to be equally
inconsiderate in response, when a small amount of effort can
produce results nearly as good -- or better.
For example, if all the "out of office autoreply:" messages to
the list get thrown out automatically, the issue never comes
up for a certain subset of the people we're talking about.
Rejecting all messages with "autoreply" subjects also takes
care of a portion of the problem. Those probably require a
little more effort than unsubscribing a list member, but it
should be much less than unsubscribing everyone who runs a
lame autoresponder over the course of the next year.
...
If stopping all mail to these recipients is deemed to be the
only way, then setting the "too many bounces" flag and letting
mailman send its occasional reminders about the suspended
account is probably friendlier than simply removing the
address.
...
Ah, but no, these people are evil -- monstrous -- and must be
removed from our sight! Why stop at unsubscribing them?
Unsubscribe their friends; unsubscribe their mothers! Let's
mailbomb them with copies of RFCs on proper mail system
practices, until their servers fall over. That'll teach 'em!
Ken,
I largely agree with you. The goal should be to stop the
behavior, especially the effect on list readers and those
posting, not to punish anyone.
However, I think the IETF benefits from policies whose effect is
to keep the clueless and inconsiderate off our mailing list
until they can be educated.
IMO, the ideal solution to problems of this sort is to set
accounts to "no postings", such that an incoming message from
the relevant address gets back a message explaining possible
causes and what to do about them. I don't think mailman
supports that capability (at least some versions of LISTSERV and
LISTPROC) did, but I assume that most of the relevant code is
available for dealing with postings by non-subscribers and
attempted posting for people who have been removed from lists
for bad behavior or the equivalent (I hope those two messages
are not the same). Whether "no mail" ("disable mail delivery")
should also be set it a matter of taste. I would think it would
be better to not do that, i.e., to keep delivering the list
messages themselves, as long as mailman and the associated MTAs
have _very_ good loop protection and suppression mechanisms.
However, if someone knows that their MTA sends out "vacation"
messages even to obvious lists and has no mechanism for
suppressing those messages when the incoming message came from a
list of user-supplied addresses, mailman usually makes it fairly
easy for a user to set "disable mail delivery" during an
out-of-office period. It seems to me that repeated failure to
do so after several cycles of "messages to list; postings
disabled; postings reinstated" ought to be sufficient grounds
for a self-inflicted PR action, i.e., banning the person from
posting again from that address without some affirmative
statement that the problem has been fixed, not just logging into
mailman and resetting the flag.
john
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