On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:27:33 +0200, Sjoerd Mullender wrote: > When mail messages bounce, the MTA (Message Transfer Agent--the program > that handles mail) *should* send the bounce message to whatever is in > the Sender header, and only if that header does not exist, should it use > the From header.
Who makes up these rules, and why should we pay the least bit of attention to them? It's one thing to say "right or wrong, that's what list admins do and you have to deal with their behaviour whatever way you can". It's another thing altogether to take the legalistic attitude of "never mind the consequences, the standard is the standard and must be unthinkingly obeyed". If the standard does more harm than good, then ignoring the standard is the right thing to do. (Better would be to change the standard, but that probably won't happen until there's a critical mass of people who ignore the existing broken standard and form their own de facto standard.) A standard isn't "correct" just because it's a standard, it's merely something that a committee has agreed to do. In other words, it's a compromise. Now, such compromises might be good and useful, or they might combine the worst of all opinions. Just because something is standardized doesn't make it the right thing to do. If you want proof of this, I give you the recently approved ISO standard for Microsoft's so-called "Office Open XML" OOXML file format. The standard behaviour of sending bounce and out-of-office messages to the sender works well when sending email to individuals, but for mailing lists it is pointless and counter-productive. Pointless, because the sender can't do anything to fix the problem he's being notified about. And counter-productive, because it is an anti-feature, something that makes the mailing list more unpleasant and less useful. Anyone who has regularly emailed to a large mailing list has surely experienced the frustration of receiving bounce messages from perfect strangers. To anyone who wishes to defend the process of sending mailing list bounces back the sender, ask yourself this: what do YOU do with such bounces when you receive them? If you ignore them or delete them (whether manually or via a procmail recipe or some other automatic system) then what benefit does the standard behaviour offer? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
