List changes? Receiving messages "to" me?

[Alex Pennace]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 12:04:08PM -0400, John Abreau wrote:
> The changes to Mailman that now send a separate copy to each
> subscriber were done to make it possible to unsubscribe the
> offenders. The only other way we could think of to deal with this
> would be to ban all AOL users from all the lists, which would punish
> a lot of innocent bystanders.

Please reconsider. As someone who has never used an AOL email account,
much less clicked on their "this is spam" foolishness, I'm just as
innocent a bystander, now being punished because of a few AOL idiots.

I get quite a bit of email, and Mutt's "~N ~p" filter is employed
extensively to help wade through the mess. Essentially, I want to read
email that is to me as soon as possible. Now I have discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org
traffic added to that mix.

I also send email to this list occasionally. When I send a message, I
would like its To: and Cc: fields reproduced as faithfully as
possible. I don't want the To: fields in my messages changed to
misrepresent who or what the intended recipient was.

No doubt this change also confuses AOL users. I suspect that
someone-YDxpq3io04c at public.gmane.org is right now saying "who is this Alex Pennace guy and
why is he writing this message to me?"

One alternative would be to employ VERP. A per-recipient envelope
sender also has the advantage of handling ordinary bounces robustly.

Another alternative would be to make this To: munging a per-subscriber
setting.

Finally -- and here is where we get into a value judgment -- you can
revert the changes, knowing that delivery to AOL subscribers will be
very unreliable. AOL has been all too keen to shift their costs onto
others. In a previous job where we sent UPS shipping notifications via
email, I advised AOL users that it would be entirely likely that the
ship notification would be eaten. Those users need to appreciate that
their provider's slow-witted userbase and lazy administration are what
is causing their email to not work.

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.