Re: ASK -- Blacklist feature will be dropped

In message <[email protected]>, Marco Paganini writes:
> 

> Hi,
> 
> Given some recent (and other not so recent) events where clueless people
> added mailer-daemon or a mailing-list address to their blacklists, I decided
> to drop the blacklist feature *entirely* for future versions of ASK.
> 
> In the upcoming v2.5.1 (beta), the blacklist will be a synonym for
> ignorelist, and no nastygrams will be sent out. Incoming emails with a match
> in the blacklist will be, naturally, ignored.
> 
> If you have coded a front-end or any other service/product based on ASK, I'd
> recommend changing your software to reflect the new behavior.
> 
> To know more about the facts leading to this decision, please see my origin=
> al
> reply to a message posted to one of Debian's mailing-list here:
> 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-wnpp/2004/10/msg00241.html
> 
> and the subsequent threads of emails that followed, here:
> 
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-wnpp/2004/10/msg00239.html
> 
> Thanks for your understanding,
> Paga
> 
> --=20
> Marco Paganini          | UNIX / Linux / Networking
> [email protected]   | PGP: http://www.paganini.net/pgp/
> http://www.paganini.net | Magnus Frater te spectat...

Sigh.  I briefly read the messages above.

I don't know Marco.  Personally, I don't think you should give in to a few
misinformed idiots.  You've developed great and very useful software!  Don't
cripple it as a "quick fix" to those who yell (and if Debian wants to drop
ASK, let them -- Debian users who want ASK will know where to get it, or
they'd switch to another distro.)

I also think it's a bad idea to change visible user behavior in any widely
used software, esp. taking away features, and esp. while in the middle of a
release (in 3.0, that'd be fine, IMHO).  I've used 2.5.x for a while and I
consider it rock solid (so don't tell me "it's only alpha/beta quality
anyway" :-)

I'd be more in favor of changing the default behavior of blacklist: make it
ignore and drop the mail by default.  But please give me the ability to send
a nastygram to those I really care to do so (very few people, in my case,
who've abused my email significantly).  You can create an undocumented (not
even in the FAQ) "expert" flag if you'd like that, if enabled in .askrc,
will send a nastygram and not just drop the mail.  And while it won't
completely eliminate the risk of bounce loops, it might minimize it enough
to a reasonable compromise between the haves and have-nots.

BTW, if the problem of loops is confined to putting postmaster-like emails
in blacklist, then why can't you have a special handling of those in
blacklists?  That is, ASK already has an exhaustive list of postmaster-like
names/addresses that it HAS to have.  So you could change the blacklist
processing such that it will always ignore postmaster-like emails appearing
in blacklist-local.txt (either do nothing w/ those and deliver them, or
treat them as an ignorelist).  Now that I think of it, I think this is an
even better/safer solution than my "secret" feature idea above.

Sincerely,
Erez.


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