Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
Unfortunately, that's not the problem. The software that runs this list is different than most other mail software. It puts the *poster* e-mail address as the address to reply to instead of its own. This means that any subscribers who are bouncing messages or running an auto-responder are flooding list contributers with bogus e-mail. It gets a lot worse when someone's got a transient delivery error... those can easily generate a dozen or more bounce messages per post.
Ehhh, not exactly. The list manager adds a Reply-To header, that header is only ment for MUAs. Is it dumb that they add that header? Yes, it sure is. Will it change? Probably not, like you said, dogma. But, that header has no effect on bounces or transient delivery errors from most MTAs. Unless the MTA is buggy, the envelope sender is the only address it will ever use for bounces, and that happens to be set to a bounce catcher like it should be (although using VERPs is far less error prone). Auto-responders OTOH are almost always broken by design, and cause no end of annoyance. Interestingly enough, if the list owner removed the Reply-To header from this list, the auto-responder *might* do the right thing and use the envelope sender instead (there's an equally likely chance it'd just use the From: header thanks to the number of broken auto-responders out there) the net effect of which would be the bounce manager would (hopefully) end up unsubcribing the idiot with the broken auto-responder. At the very least it might mean a less annoying backscatter for the list users. -- Jamie Heilman http://audible.transient.net/~jamie/ "Paranoia is a disease unto itself, and may I add, the person standing next to you may not be who they appear to be, so take precaution." -Sathington Willoughby