Problem in mailing list ?!

[Bob Proulx]

Milan Kocian wrote:
> This is bug or feature ?! For all reply I got this message.

I assume that everyone who is posting a message is getting these
bounces back.  I get one to every one of my postings.  This has been
going on for quite a while now.  It is annoying.  This is not
something that you as a subscriber can affect.  It is an issue that
can only be resolved by the mailing list owner by unsubscribing that
address.

There is a user subscribed to the mailing list that has two problems.
Of course one is that their address is bouncing messages.  But more
importantly their MTA is incorrectly bouncing messages back to the
message author and not the message sender.  The MTA is ignoring the
mail headers 'Precedence: list' which should discard any such notices
and also ignoring the Errors-To: redirecting any such errors back to
the mailing list management software should they be incorrectly
generated.  The MTA is so misconfigured that I would consider
blacklisting it until it is fixed.

I also assume that there is a problem with identifying the actual
subscriber or the mailing list owner would already have removed them.
I have reported this problem to the mailing list owner a couple of
times previously but so far there has only been silence in return
about the issue.

Without VERP[1] and other techniques these problems have plagued
mailing lists for years.  I have seen people resort to sending an
individual message to every subscriber in order to track down the
offending address.

Bob

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_envelope_return_path
    http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt
    http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq02.002.htp