On Friday, May 18, 2001, at 03:20 PM, David W. Tamkin wrote:
> Having never run a list with an essential business purpose, I've found
> that
> writing to adminstrators was counterproductive.
Essential business is in the eye of the beholder. And even then, it's
still counterproductive...
(if you want to have a fun discussion about "essential business", get
into a discussion of how to subset USENET so that you're only
distributing "business" newsgroups -- when you run USENET for a company
involved in electronic music, video, computer games... There's a lot to
life beyond comp.sys.mac, but management doesn't always realize that
until you start asking...
> On a re-
> tail provider, the postmaster was willing to listen only to paying
> customers,
> leading to Chuq's policy:
>
if then (grin)
> (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
I've banned a few sites over time; almost always because their software
is braindamaged to the point of being dangerous to my lists -- there are
some sites out there that either break and start feeding stuff back at
the list, or wh's idea of a bounce is to simply redirect messages back
at the list. When I find those, they go away.
I think there are only two sites I've banned for administrative
malfeasance -- one is juno.com, and the other is one that's no longer
with us. juno did (perhaps, does) no checking of new accounts, so a user
could create an infinite number of accounts to circumvent a ban. When
one finally did, and juno's admins were MIA, I banned the site (FWIW,
juno's admins answered my complains six weeks later with an apology, but
refused to take responsibility, change their policies, or actually do
anything. They stayed banned...). The other, when I had problem with one
of their users, was actually more abusive than the original troublemaker
was. That made it easy...
> 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.
but it's a good reminder to sweat the details, and not give them any
reason to reject stuff. You never know what stupid things people will
come up with, so try to avoid doing stupid things... (grin)
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
When an agnostic dies, does he go to the "great perhaps"?
