Beartooth wrote, | And if we could have a pool, my bet on the number of | replies I get, under the Net (never to the list!), thanking me for | saying so, would be three to five.
Tooth, you didn't consider that we changed the clocks back today in North America and many on this list have an extra hour to kill. Seriously, my take on it is that the RFC(2)821 return address is proper for reactions to receipt, while the RFC(2)822 reply address is proper for responses to content. It is a difficult situation. The bounce has to go to the list administrator, the refuser can't redesign the bounce to go the poster and has no right anyway telling the poster not to post, the list administrator probably has no cause to silence or boot the poster, and the list administrator cannot be held responsible for implementing personal feuds and keeping the disliked poster's articles from being sent to the refuser. (What if the refuser wanted to switch to digest -- should [s]he get a special edition without the dislikee's posts? What if the refuser visited the list archives and got offended that the dislikee's posts are visible there?) The only solution I see is for the list administrator to tell the refuser to get a webmail account or such elsewhere, off AOL, where the filtering capabilities allow silently trashing posts from any other members the person dislikes, and to resubscribe then; in the meanwhile, the refuser's Mail Controls settings are toxic, and his/her AOL address -- but not him/her as a person -- cannot be on the list. There have been a handful of times in my own history of running lists that I've asked a subscriber to find email service elsewhere: (s)he was welcome on the list but his/her site's MTA configuration or policies were not. Of course, the refuser won't budge, so the administrator has to apply whatever the standard policy: N bounces and a subscriber's address is deemed invalid and the subscription is closed.
