Changes to the mailinglist setup

[MJ Ray]

Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry.com> wrote:
> [John Goerzen]
> > We return 550 during the SMTP conversation.  If this was something
> > from a real human, they'd be contacting us another way.
>
> Right.  I believe this way of measuring false positives is inaccurate,
> as I know some users will just curse and conclude that if the system
> refuse to accept the email, they will just ignore the user [...]

Where "some users" includes SPI Deputy Treasurer Branden Robinson who 
used to note it on http://deadbeast.net/~branden/homepage/mailblock.html 
which says "I find blacklisting based on originating IP, when that IP is 
not a known source of spam, to be unethical and discourteous."  
rfc-ignorant, dsbl and securitysage look like they can list non-sources, 
but this is a more general ethic, as spotting false positives is hard.

> Several times I have tried to submit a patch to a
> software proejct only to have the email rejected.  In those cases, I
> just leave it at that, because I do not want to spend more time on
> people rejecting valid email.

Yes, I've had that happen and it sucks.  More when I was with Wanadoo or 
Pipex - phonecoop is smaller and is less likely to have an unnoticed 
listing for long, but it still sometimes happens.  I published the 
blocked patches, but some of them (better blind support for Mailman, for 
example) haven't been applied AFAIK.

> Here at work they use the blacklists to decide the speed of the SMTP
> responses.  [...]

That's clever.  I do something similar on trackbacks and comments and it 
mostly stops them after the first response.  Is there a guide to setting 
that up for mailservers?

Best wishes,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble