sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) (10/23/85)
>Various complaints about arpanet messages sent to usenet people because >some arpanet machine couldn't contact another to forward a mailing list. (Put on your asbestos suit. Here it comes.) This is happening to me too. I once had this happen on net.micro.amiga to the point where I was getting 8 junk mail messages a day. This happened for two weeks (until the involved computers decided to give up). Frankly, this pisses me off. This is not the way the software should behave. I would think that arpa sites would be more responsible than that. This is not something that needs to be handled on an individual basis. The software needs to be changed to do more intelligent things when a mailing list can't go to a particular machine. The obviously correct thing to do would be to mail notices to the person responsible for the forwarding instead of sending personal mail to the poster of the message. Gatewaying articles into arpanet is a Nice Thing, but this brain-damaged behavior is costing Usenet people a lot of money. They have to pay real phone bills! I am quite seriously thinking of writing a program to pull such messages out of my mailbox and mail them back to the offending machine. I think maybe if something like that got posted and people started using it then the people responsible would take action to correct it. I wonder how much money has been wasted because of these messages? Think about my case. Eight messages a day containing the entire source of my postings repeated for two weeks. That's 112 junk mails. You want to pay for it? I don't. (You can remove the asbestos suit now.) Sean -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean Casey UUCP: sean@ukma.UUCP or 915 Patterson Office Tower {cbosgd,anlams,hasmed}!ukma!sean University of Kentucky ARPA: ukma!sean@ANL-MCS.ARPA Lexington, Ky. 40506-0027 BITNET: sean@UKMA.BITNET -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU (Erik E. &) (10/25/85)
In article <2323@ukma.UUCP> sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) writes: >>Various complaints about arpanet messages sent to usenet people because >>some arpanet machine couldn't contact another to forward a mailing list. > >I am quite seriously thinking of writing a program to pull such messages out >of my mailbox and mail them back to the offending machine. I think maybe if >something like that got posted and people started using it then the people >responsible would take action to correct it. Consider yourself lucky. Every message that leaves the USENET from ucbvax bound for an ARPANET mailing list has two headers added to it: Sender: usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu Errors-To: usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu I'm usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu. Imagine my mailbox. If a mailer is implemented properly, it should send error messages back to the `Sender:'. `Errors-To:' is something that sendmail knows about, which I insert as insurance. The offending systems that have been incorrectly routing error messages back to the USENET poster are all TENEX/TWENEX systems. I encourage you to bombard the mailbox postmaster@offending.arpa.host for each error message you receive. If you (and others) lambast the individual postmasters sufficiently, perhaps they will in turn poke the mailer implementer(s) to FIX the damned things. Among other odious behaviour exhibited by these mailers is that they will try an address for three days, and EACH DAY they will send an update if the message has not gotten through. Personally, I only want to know when my message finally fails. Before that, I don't want to hear it! keeper of the network news for ucbvax, and guardian of the gateway, Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU