Re:Wrong address unsubscribed

At 10:56 AM -0500 1/6/03, Don Doumakes is rumored to have typed:

> Recently I had an episode
> in which subscriber A started selectively bouncing all mail from
> subscriber B.

   It's unlikely he's "bouncing" mail through his SMTP server; I could, for
example, add your address to sendmail's access file as a REJECT, but your
list messages would still get through, since when the list distributes a
message _it_ is the envelope sender, not you. Looks more like A is doing
something with procmail, or worse some moronic Windoze application that
trusts the From: header field.

> Leaving aside the question of why A and B can't just get along, is
> there a solution to the erroneous behavior?  Is this a bug of which the
> developers are aware?

   Since I can't see the bounces A was generating, I wouldn't want to declare
that there _isn't_ some obscure bug in SmartList, but I'd be more prone to
think the problem was the way A was bouncing the messages. I've (rarely) seen
SmartList get confused by badly malformed mailer messages, but in 99.99% of
the cases SmartList gets it right even then...and I've seen some so screwed
up that _I_ had a hard time figuring out what address the mailer was
rejecting.

   Your specific problem doesn't seem to call for a technical solution, but
rather a social one. My solution would be, as listmaster, to reinstate B and
immediately unsubscribe A until A bought a clue on how to tell the difference
between Return-Path: and From:. A is welcomed to dump mail from B to
/dev/null, but A is _not_ welcomed to impact my mailing list server in a tiff
with B. You don't need to judge (nor even _care_) who's "right" between A and
B, you only need to show that B's actions are NOT impacting your server
negatively, where A's ARE, so A needs the attitude adjustment.

   Assuming A understood that sending mail back to the list was unacceptable
and stopped it, I'd reinstate A provisionally (probably logging any mail from
A's end of the world for a while to prevent it from happening again). If on
the other hand A refused to deal with the problem, you're likely better off
without A on your list anyway, since this _will_ happen again when A gets
miffed at C. And D. And...

   But that's just me, and you're welcomed to handle it however you feel
comfortable. This would be an interesting question to pose to list-managers
or the like, but I don't see SmartList being directly at fault here. This
seems squarely within the social domain of the listmaster.

         Charlie