Chuq Von Rospach wrote,
| To be blunt about it, there's not a lot you can do. Writing admins to
| poke at them is usually fruitless.
Having never run a list with an essential business purpose, I've found that
writing to adminstrators was counterproductive. If the list member was on an
account at work or school, telling the postmaster that my leisure-topic list
isn't reaching the person would just get me a nasty note back from the member
for my getting him/her into trouble for personal use of email. [The concept
that it was not I but (s)he got him/herself into the trouble by using the e-
mail access in a prohibited fashion never occurred to any of them.] On a re-
tail provider, the postmaster was willing to listen only to paying customers,
leading to Chuq's policy:
| When a given site gets too annoying, I simply unsubscribe the user, send
| them a private note explaining why, suggesting THEY poke at their admin to
| get their act together, and ask them not to resubscribe until their site's
| fixed.
As HTTP access and webmail and popmail servers proliferated, I took to shut-
ting off their subscriptions and sending a note explaining why and advising
them to open a webmail or popmail account on a better-run system. (In some
cases I found the old site's behavior or policy so unacceptable that I banned
the site from the list, telling all future applicants from it that they had
to get an address elsewhere to join and any other current subscribers on it
that they had thirty days to provide me with another address or I'd have to
stop sending the list to them rather than continue to fight with their site's
mailers.) Asking the user to pound sense into an admin's head is a waste of
time. First, you need an admin who can grasp the concept of not already
knowing everything and having something to learn, of being imperfect and hav-
ing room for improvement. Next, you need one who believes that such informa-
tion or advice could possibly come from a lowly user.
Nick Simicich wrote, addressing William Silvert,
> Hmmm, I just checked the address you sent from based on the received lines.
> It does not have reverse DNS set up (there is no in-addr.arpa pointer, so
> gethostbyaddr() will not work). My servers won't accept direct e-mail
> from your server either. Tell the administrators of the major ipimar.pt to
> get their act together and fix their configuration problems. The problem
> is at your end.
I wouldn't be surprised if many articles from mailing lists are rejected be-
cause the listserver's sending IP address in the SMTP transaction doesn't
match the author's domain in the RFC822 From: line and therefore is assumed
to be relayed spam. That's an absolutely ridiculous way to run a site, but
there's no telling what's out there. I've had list items bounce because the
user (who had voluntarily subscribed to the list) or the admins rejected all
mail that arrived as blind carbons, all in the name of fighting spam.
