> Here's one battle I want to watch from very far away.
>
> ezmlm and some other list packages that use qmail as their MTA send all posts
> and digests out with a VERP that includes -recipient=domain.of.recipient and
> confirmation requests for joining and quitting with reply addresses that
> likewise include equal signs.
>
> It has just come to light today that webmail accounts on sites that run
> BigMailBox will not accept equal signs in outgoing addresses, considering
> them illegal. So users of such systems cannot confirm their attempts to
> join such a list, or, if they got on some other way, they cannot confirm
> their attempts to leave it. Also, I'd guess that list distributions to
> closed, renamed, or over-quota accounts on such sites aren't bounced back,
> because the mailer-daemon probably can't write to an address with an equal
> sign either.
>
> BMB software is free to webmasters in return for carrying ads on their sites
> for advertisers who buy space from BMB, and the sites themselves get a cut of
> the advertising revenue. At least two of my webmail accounts run BMB.
>
> (BMB does allow hyphens, periods, plus signs, ampersands, apostrophes, pipes,
> and underscores. What the sense is in allowing ampersands and pipes, I can't
> guess; there is a risk that it may be given unquoted to a shell prompt or
> shell script at the other end. Meanwhile, if ever I have to send a suffixed
> Reply-To: address to what could be a BigMailBox site, I suppose a pipe or an
> ampersand could substitute for the usual equal sign.)
>
> Somebody is wrong here. and I've a feeling it isn't the qmail people.
It's not qmail that's broken. There are very few characters that are not
allowed on the left side of an email address. LISTSERV uses asterisks for
a similar purpose and we've run into problems with Banyan Mail gateways
that don't seem to like that.
