Tim <bodysurf(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote,
| I really don't want to get into a flame war; your emails to the PROCMAIL
| mailing list have always been excellent.
Thank you, and I don't want to get into a flame war either. I hated having
to state my objections to Wotan's setup publicly, but he allows no option.
I'd have written to him privately about it if I could, but he makes that
impossible; then again, if he didn't make it impossible, I'd have had no
cause to tell anyone, including Wotan, that he was doing inadvisable things,
because that's the very thing he's doing wrong.
| I think debating the validity of such a policy is more a matter akin to
| politics or religion rather than black or white.
Now, I must in all fairness admit that when I first spoke up against Wotan's
arrangement, I had not yet seen Tim's superior implementation, so it seemed
to me that their position had no net merit, its advantages being outweighed
by its drawbacks. Tim's handling nearly eliminates the disadvantages.
Tim's "your mail is trashed unless" setup is very different from Wotan's in
a fundamental aspect. If you write to Tim and his arrangement trashes your
letter because it doesn't already know you as a permitted sender, his autore-
sponder tells you the extra step to take to get through (and it's something
a spammer would just about never bother to do) and still reach him. If you
write to Wotan and his software doesn't recognize you as a permitted sender,
his autoresponder informs you that he won't accept mail from strangers, peri-
od, and if you try to disguise your mail as a kind that he does accept, he
will take even stronger action against you.
My disagreement with Tim's setup is only over subjective matters. I would
never warn anyone "Don't do what Tim is doing!" and I would say, "Personal-
ly, I would do it differently from Tim," only if the subject comes up.
So if you want to send Tim email that his .procmailrc doesn't expect, there's
a way, but if Wotan doesn't know you and you want to reach him, you're out of
luck. (If what you are trying to tell him is something he needs to know for
his own good, then it's Wotan who's out of luck. No, my own attempt to mail
him was not a life-or-death emergency; I was trying to answer a procmail
question he had posted here.)
And that's my objection to Wotan's setup: the absolute I-have-prepared-for-
all-possibilities-and-can-never-be-wrong immutable finality of its decisions.
Either of their arrangements is a recipe for embarrassment: how easily can
one of them write to someone, asking a question, and then reject the reply
because he forgot to add the person he asked to his permitted senders list?
(If Tim doesn't add the person to his permitted senders list, he has a second
chance when he writes, because he can tell the other person how to get past
his rejector.)
| All other emails are bounced back to the sender with a polite email
| stating the reason their email was bounced (it didn't meet the above
| criteria) and how to get their email thru should they *really* want to.
Tim, you have described your own rejection arrangement there, but you did not
describe Wotan's.
| No offense intended, ok?
None inferred!