On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 01:57:17AM +0000, Chris Ball wrote: > So, um, I've always wondered; what sort of test of an e-mail system > requires you to send mail to a couple of hundred people rather than > to, say, yourself at another account, or a friend?
This is an old trolls' favourite argument, try Google. Although it isn't often necessary, with closed mailing lists sometimes it's just /easier/ to fire off a mail and send 200k of headers flurrying around the net than to RTFM, RTFS, or whatever other argument there is. Take for eg. the confusion between envelope from, From:, and other types of headers that different MLMs treat differently. How can I know that my mails are getting through to london.pm without explicitly trying every combination of my subscribed address in each of the above headers until one of them arrives back in my mailbox? The answer is, that unless london.pm's list's exact configuration is documented, especially in regards to its policy on which posts belong to subscribers and which don't, this poor guy couldn't be sure his mails were arriving until he posted. Another debate that usually arises from such an e-mail is, have you ever considered the bandwidth you used up to flame him for sending the e-mail in the first place? Or how about the bandwidth I'm about to waste by posting this reply? David.
