Bug in mailing lists; unfriendly to non-subscribers

[JD]

  On 07/05/2010 09:24 PM, Tim wrote:
> 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.
>
It seems to me we have discussed this to death.
Already there is too much noise about this very
bad idea.
Let's leave it at that and move on to fedora and linux issues
and not about how this list is managed.