Nathan J. Mehl wrote:
> Okay, massive disclaimer here. I work for Mail.Com, formerly iName.
> I could, in fact, be called its postmaster.
[...]
> I believe that you have simply been unlucky in the amount of
> time it took to have the problem fixed. There are over five
> million iName users -- we are not a small company and it is
> possible for it to take some time to respond to requests. We
> generally meet a 5-hour turnaround on most customer-service
> issues -- you have my apologies on our behalf that this took
> so much longer.
>
> I have located the account causing you the problem and de-activated
> it. You should see a more indicative bounce message shortly.
Tnanks. I appreciate that.
> And that's it for the company. From here on down, I'm speaking
> for myself:
> In the immortal words of Thomas Gramstad ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
>>
>> 2. The subscriber's account at ISP 2 is closed, and address 2
>> produces error messages to the list manager. No clue to address 1
>> can be easily identified, but ISP 1 can be identified from the
>> headers or contents of the error message.
> This has been a general problem for list managers (myself included)
> since the first mailing list was created.
Yes, of course, it is a standard, oft-repeated problem.
Therefore, one expects routines to be in place for handling it.
And therefore, one is justified to expect a quick response.
> Several mailing list managers include features to help deal with
> it, and two MTAs (qmail and postfix) implement Variable Envelope
> Response Paths to solve the problem permanently.
I'm not in a position to decide what MTA my university is using.
But I know that they are thinking seriously about switching from
sendmail to exim.
>> I have received no answer to my request, copyed below. Meanwhile,
>> I continue to receive error messages. Since it is your (now
>> defunct) user that is causing these error messages, it is your
>> responsibility to help stop these error messages by providing
>> the information that I asked for. I will not spend any more time
>> writing more requests to you. Instead, I will simply forward all
>> error messages I receive to you, until I get the infomation I need
>> to stop them. This message, therefore, is a notification to you
>> that you will receive such error messages, until that time.
> While I sympathize with your frustration in not getting an
> immediate response, I think its safe to say that threats of
> annoyance/harassment are IN GENERAL a good way to get one's
> request -- however otherwise reasonable -- taken less seriously.
First: Returning error messages to a non-responsive ISP who is
generating them cannot, by any reasonable definition of the
term, be called "harassment".
Secondly, as to "annoyance", my experience contradicts your claim.
In the lack of responsiveness to polite requests, my experience is
that making a lot of noise and being an annoyance will get the
job done. The meek do not inherit the earth. Repeated polite
requests do not work if the first two polite requests do not work.
In such cases, being a pain works, because then they will want you
off their back. That's just how the world works.
>> At the very least I think that this behavior, or non-behavior as
>> the case may be, qualifies for blacklisting.
> Honestly, this is silly. The forwarding problem has existed
> since long before iName or any other free email service, and
> going five days without hearing a response to a postmaster mail,
> while aggravating, is hardly in itself reason to do anything
> more drastic than, say, block out a domain locally.
Well, I don't honestly know if blacklisting is warranted, what
I do know is that suggesting it solved my problem.
As I said, standard problems should be handled routinely and
in a timely fashion -- that is a reasonable expectation.
But since my posting, several other people have come forward
with the exact same experience and complaint as I did, about
iname/Mail.com. Including one sent to me personally that I
will anonymize and append below. In other words, this doesn't
look like a one-time accident, it looks like a pattern of
negligence. If that really is the case, I would say that
blacklisting might be an appropriate response.
Thomas Gramstad
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----------------------------------
And here is the anonymized response:
---begin
> I had the exact same situation as a new mailing list owner. It
> went on for months until I finally had to break my list down
> into smaller lists of 15 or so addresses and mail them
> individually until I finally found the "offending address".
>
> I developed a template, stating exactly why they were receiving
> the "probe", and explaining iName was unresponsive in assisting
> me in any way. I also stated in my template that the
> possibility existed that they might receive more than one of
> these probes. Fortunately, I found the culprit before I had to
> send out very many duplicates.
>
> The way I went about it was to send myself the template with 15
> of my member's addresses in the BCC field (I weeded out all
> addresses I KNEW were not the culprit first). Then I waited to
> see if I got the bounce. When I did not get the bounce after the
> first set, then I tried the second set of 15 addresses the next
> day. I got the bounce on the third day, and resent the template
> to the first 5 addresses in the third set of 15. I believe I
> found the bad address on the second set of five, so thankfully
> not too many had to suffer the duplicates.
>
> I was very lucky in that this bad address was in my digest
> version, which had only about 350 members. I figured it would
> take about 20 days to go through the entire list. If your list
> is very large, this particular method will probably not be
> feasible, but for me, it was the only thing I could come up
> with.
>
> I had also written several letters to iName, without ever
> receiving a reply at all. I searched their website and wrote to
> every address I could find...only got an autoresponse. I wanted
> soooo badly to ban their domain from subscriber list, but with
> all those different vanity addresses, I found it would be more
> trouble than I wanted to go through.
>
> As a side note, I did not receive any complaints about the
> "probe". Guess folks understand more than we think sometimes.
---end
