At 00:40 2000-01-06 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
This list is misconfigured, and Ed & I started talking to ourselves
instead of to the list;-((
Misconfigured how? Do you mean that because it doesn't set Reply-To: to
the list? Bah, I got over that some time ago - I set my own outbound
headers to reply-to the list.
[Ed sez:]
Bouncing is not a good idea since it doubles the usage of the bandwidth.
Certainly one can trim the body before bouncing?
Bouncing at the MTA is definatley more efficient - by refusing it during
the delivery envelope initiation (SMTP "MAIL FROM") you can refuse the
message even before the body of the message (or the headers for that
matter) have been sent to you. Whats more, the senders MTA generates the
bulk of the message to them reporting the result code your MTA gave when it
refused the message - YOUR server doesn't send the bounce message when it
is refused in this fashion.
The "Precedence:" header is not used for mailing lists, only Usenet.
RFC-2076 <http://www.tac.nyc.ny.us/cgi-bin/rfc?2076> lists the more common
message headers. Section 3.9 ("Quality information") lists Precedence.
Although it has the comments "Nonstandard, controversial, discouraged", the
mere fact that it lists the header concedes that it is in wide use in
email. The procmail list isn't alone in using it, as virtually ALL lists
I've seen use a "Precedence: list" or "Precedence: bulk" header.
[John Sez:]
By 'bounce' i mean coax sendmail into declining to accept the message
accusing the sender of being a spammer. This is most likely to result in
the subscriber being unsubscribed and yeilding a nett saving of bandwidth.
A sendmail response saying '571 recipient not authorised to receive this'
would likely get the message across.
Unlikely to get you off of a spammer's list - they don't bother cleaning
old/broken addresses from their lists.
---
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395