Bug in mailing lists; unfriendly to non-subscribers

[Tim]

Todd Zullinger:
>> Prior to today the list was set to discard posts from non-members.
>> This setting was made before any of the current list admins were
>> present AFAIK.  I believe that sending a rejection is the more
>> courteous setting, and we have changed this now.

Andre Robatino:
> Won't this generate backscatter?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_%28e-mail%29

I think it would.  Most spams have forged headers, and rather than being
complete faked addresses, they're addresses belonging to someone else.
It's an old trick to spam someone so that rejects become spam to yet
another person.

It'd be different if you could reject during the SMTP stage, and a
poster's attempt would fail during the attempt, not after.  But very
very few people make a direct connection to the end SMTP server, so that
doesn't work any more.  They send to their ISP, it accepts, and forwards
on.  SMTP rejection is too late, by then.

The list becomes a potentially *large* source of spam, when rejecting
mail to a third party.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.