It would be fanstastic if someone could do something about this.  I
have tried now on two occasions, but it's still happening...

What you see below is what happens when an email address in a mailing
list goes bad for some reason, and there's a brain-dead MTA at the
recipieent end dealing with the problem.  (BTW, no prizes for guessing
what brand of mail server is being used at that end).

Every time anyone posts a message into this mailing list, they will
inevitably get one of these aimless and stupid messages bounced back
at them.

What is almost certainly happening here is that someone who was
subscribed to the mailing lists at vger.rutgers.edu.au no longer has a
valid email address (or never did in the first place).

So what happens?  Because the list mail originates from people who
post the message in the first place, the error mail gets sent back to
them.  As it now stands, if you post to linux-config, you pay the
penalty for it!

Bah!  I for one don't care, nor do I want to know about it -- it's NOT
my problem.

Please make this stop!

The pity of this is that the error message returned by the mickyslop
MTA is as uninformative as the message is useless.  A real MTA (like
sendmail, qmail, etc) would at least give some idea of what is causing
the problem and then what to do about it.

Ok, I know I'm bitching, but I've tried in private email to get
something done about this.  So I'm now resorting to making a noise
about it to a wider audience.

These things are (or should be) easy to fix.  It shouldn't happen in
the first place.  I'm subscribed to around 30 mailing lists (and have
been so for several years - thank got for procmail to pre-sort it all
as it is delivered!), and I must admit that this doesn't happen too
often.  But it is highly irritating when it does happen and nothing is
done about fixing it.

For the innocent bystanders here, the lessons to be learned are: (1)
not to use brain-dead Mail Transport Agents, and (2) if you ever
become system administrators, PLEASE learn how to configure things
like this properly!

(BTW, no disrepute to the fine folks at vger.rutgers.edu -- having
been tuned in to the mailng lists there for at least 5 years, I know
that they do a damn fine job there, and sometimes under difficult
circumstances).

Sorry to intrude... now back to your regular viewing.

Cheers
Tony Nugent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Systems Administrator

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Wed, 03 Nov 1999 21:30:00 +1100
From:    PostMaster7 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:      Tony Nugent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mail failure


[008] Failure delivering user mail due to mailbag contention.
Mail item was not delivered to:


- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- --
Microsoft Mail v3.0 (MAPI 1.0 Transport) IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note
From: Tony Nugent
To:  Song Jianping
Cc:  Linux Config Email List
Subject:  Re: Re[2]: why two patterns of time displayed?
Date: 1999-11-03 22:18
Priority: 3
Message ID: E6CC9F62DB91D311AE790008C724ADD2


On Wed Nov 03 1999 at 16:11, Song Jianping wrote:

[ ... contents of my message to the mailing list deleted ...]

------- End of Forwarded Message

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