On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 01:26:41PM +0000, Tim Landscheidt wrote:
Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On most lists we discard, not reject, for
unsubscribed messages --
sending a mail back to hundreds of spam messages a day results in
spamming everybody with bogus bounce messages.
Welcome to the wonderful world of dealing with
email administration. :(
Rejection is a nice courtesy (well, sort of :-)), as it
indicates to the user that the pipeline from his mail client
to Wikimedia is working and gives him clear advice what he
has to do to post to the mailing list. So I would appreciate
changing this configuration as soon as the dumps are rede-
signed :-).
If "reject" from the mailing list means the sender gets a 5xx error
during his SMTP session that is trying to deliver the message to "us",
then "reject" is the better action.
If "reject" from the mailing list means that the sender's SMTP session
succeeds (possibly before the mailing list manager even sees the
message) and later a bounce message is sent to the purported sender,
then "discard" is the better action for exactly the reason brion states.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the latter case is the situation for this
list because I trust the Wikimedia employees know what they're doing.