AOL sender filters

Bill Campbell bill at celestial.com
Sat Feb 28 14:17:22 PST 2004


On Sat, Feb 28, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 11:29:51AM -0800, Bill Campbell thus
>spoke:
>
>> I'm getting more than a bit tired of seeing messages like this
>> in my postmaster mailbox every day. I get enough messages to
>> deal with without having to see who some members don't like.
>
>> These bounces come from AOL's mail filters. I don't use AOL
>> so don't know how these work so can't say whether there's an
>> option to turn the bounce notices off, but if there isn't I
>> would suggest that the AOL users who don't want to read mail
>> from list members learn to JHD (Just Hit Delete), and remove
>> the filters.
>
>> I'm about ready to take these bounce messages as an indication
>> that the person doesn't want to receive mail from the Filepro
>> list at all, and remove their subscription.
>
>To me that seems like a reasonable move, and then they can
>re-subscribe from a system that won't have that problem  I had one
>domain that was such a serious spam attractant, that I had the
>people who had the website change the mails for that domian to
>another account, and had them put the names in graphics.  Then I
>shut down all MX records for that domains.

In spite of our e-mail filters, spamassassin, etc. when I opened
my general mailbox this morning, I found 30 of 32 new messages
was spam that had gotten by the filters.  This mailbox isn't as
well-protected as the mailing lists, but it's pretty bad.

...
>The other solution might be to configure your digestifier so that
>replies go to the list by default when you make a reply, instead of
>going to the user who sent it.   

I'll never set the Reply-To to go back to the list because (a) I think that
posting a message to a few hundred people should require a bit of effort,
and (b) I've seen far too many cases where mail went to a mailing list that
was supposed to be a personal reply to the sender, and not for public
consumption.

Chip Rosenthal covers all the bases here:

	http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

>I recall that you had a reaon for replies to be sent to the
>originator by default and not back to the list, but I don't recall
>what it was.   Many of the lists I subscribe to default to repling
>to the list.

Just because many lists do it doesn't make it right.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

``We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call
free enterprise,'' said Cash McCall, "but when one of our citizens
show enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit, we do
our best to make him feel that he ought to be ashamed of himself."
		-- Cameron Hawley


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