On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 11:50:17AM -0800, Greg Connor wrote:
| Another option is to do what mailing lists do - mark the envelope with
| their own address (mail from: in SMTP transaction and Return-Path: of
| <bounces(_at_)website(_dot_)com>) and leave the From: in the message as the
supposed
| user. That way the receiver can click Reply to reply to the sender, but
| the website owner gets to deal with the bounces. If they want to notify
| the sender that the message came back, they can use SRS, or come up with
| their own other method to relay the bounce on to him, possibly adding their
| own message saying "We tried to send this for you but failed".
|
| Most of these services verify the sender's address before allowing him to
| send. So, sending the bounces back to the user is probably fine, but if
| the sender is not verified they shouldn't be sending him bounces (nor
| should they fake his email on the outgoing message anyway).
Not all mailing lists do that, though I believe they should. Conceptually,
to me, a mailing list is an automated delivery of a forum content, which may,
or may not, contain the actual email address of who posted. Being able to
reply to that poster is a convenience, not a necessity to the protocol. It
would be nice if mail user agents better understood the distinction between
sending only to the poster and sending to the whole group. It works on
some (for example 'g' instead of 'r' in my "mutt" MUA), but not all, mailing
lists.
It works on spf-discuss. I pressed 'g' to do this. On some it also includes
the poster, but many people don't want the redundant copy (I don't, either,
but at least I don't throw fits over it).
The historical first mailing lists, which were long lines in /etc/aliases,
were really terribly bad hacks, but they worked. I think it is sad that so
many people do a hack like that and think it is such a clever and simple
solution, and don't realize the future consequences of locking people into
a limited, and often brain-dead, facility.
There is yet another option for mailing lists, though I am sure that it will
meet a lot of resistance. That option is to not send mail anymore. Many
mailing lists do have web-only capability (meaning someone can choose to use
only the web access to both read all postings and send their own). What can
be done is to add "private IMAP" capability. The way that would work is to
create an "account" at the mailing list server for that user's subscription.
They then add that as a new mailbox in their MUA (most of them these days
handle that rather well). Then instead of mail on the list being sent by
SMTP, it is picked up, when desired, by IMAP. The server would not have to
actually keep a copy for everyone, either. It can simply keep a set of
flags indicating what posted messages have been seen or not just like a web
interface would do. And IMAP can do submissions via a special folder, so
SMTP wouldn't even have to be used for that. NNTP would also be an option.
I for one despise mailing lists, but I have to live with them. I have gone
to using separate mailboxes for each (I'm subscribed to 134 mailing lists via
such separate mailboxes right now). An IMAP or NNTP _solution_ would make me
so happy. But we have to fight off the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
crowd who think everything created in the 1980's is just fine.
--
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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