On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 01:26:41PM +0000, Tim Landscheidt wrote:
Brion Vibber brion@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.