Sorry about all those messages congratulating you for your skill at
sending e-mail. My autoresponder seems to have been subscribed at 2:00
this morning, I fixed it as soon as I came in about 11:00.
I have been running an autoresponder for readers of Dummies books for
several years without much trouble. In the past couple of months, people
have started to subscribe my autoresponder to various mailing lists, with
predictably unpleasant results. I do have mail loop detection code in
place (it works, too, you wouldn't believe how many domains have
postmaster addresses that bounce) but there's enough variation in the
headers that different mailing list managers use that it's really hard to
guess in advance how to identify them all.
This is the first smartlist list that it's gotten on, so now I see what
smartlist's headers look like, so now I've fiddled the filters so in the
future it won't respond to anything sent from smartlist.
LISTSERV and Majordomo can be set to require confirmation for list
subscriptions, e.g. you ask to subscribe, it sends back a message with a
magic word, and you respond with the magic word. This is increasingly
essential as spammers with tiny brains try to use existing mailing lists
to spew their crud. It would be really nice if smartlist had this as an
option; indeed, if it did I'd be using it to manage a bunch of unrelated
lists I run rather than struggling with Majordomo.
Finally, it's not clear whether my responder got subscribed deliberately
or due to a failed tweak to someone else's anti-spam filters. The first
two messages are copied below (neither had any body, they were just
headers), see if you can figure it out. I can't.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, http://iecc.com, Trumansburg NY
Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies"
and Information Superhighwayman wanna-be
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From: Ray Bagley <ray(_at_)innerx(_dot_)net>
Reply-To: Ray Bagley <ray(_at_)innerx(_dot_)net>
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Organization: Isn't that a "four letter word"?
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