On Jul 13, 2007, at 05:09, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 13-jul-2007, at 8:00, Ken Raeburn wrote:
That doesn't help much, because then we all still get private
vacation messages. Please kick these people off the list.
Shutting off their list email when we don't need to seems kind of
drastic.
So people who are SO inconsiderate that they not only send vacation
messages for messages sent to mailinglists, which is clearly
extremely undesirable behavior, but even worse, send those messages
to the LIST, should be spared all possible inconvenience?
Certainly not. But that doesn't mean we need to be equally
inconsiderate in response, when a small amount of effort can produce
results nearly as good -- or better.
For example, if all the "out of office autoreply:" messages to the
list get thrown out automatically, the issue never comes up for a
certain subset of the people we're talking about. Rejecting all
messages with "autoreply" subjects also takes care of a portion of
the problem. Those probably require a little more effort than
unsubscribing a list member, but it should be much less than
unsubscribing everyone who runs a lame autoresponder over the course
of the next year.
Of course, those only deal with automatic replies to the list itself,
not to individual posters.
The effort required to implement "set digest flag for recipient, add
recipient to auto-reject list, and send this form letter" would be
more than a couple minutes' development work, at least for someone
not intimately familiar with mailman, but need happen only once
(unless it's tightly integrated into mailman, the upstream developers
don't incorporate it, the next release requires rewriting it, etc).
If it's done right, invoking it when individuals complain to the list
admins about a subscriber should be about as easy as unsubscribing
the person. Similar effort could streamline the restoring of a
subscriber's posting rights when they return (and let them fix the
digest setting, if they care). Adding a new "no-send" flag that is
changeable by the subscriber, and when set prevents them from sending
to the list, would be a bit more work, but would remove the second
half of the ongoing imposition on the list admins.
If stopping all mail to these recipients is deemed to be the only
way, then setting the "too many bounces" flag and letting mailman
send its occasional reminders about the suspended account is probably
friendlier than simply removing the address.
That's assuming the list admins are going to go ahead and change one
person's subscription based on another person's complaint, without
verifying the problem themselves. You could automate the whole "send
probe message and suspend account on receipt of autoreply" process,
if you wanted to try to streamline that part of the list admin job.
I have no idea how many people use mail systems that send autoreplies
to the individual contributors. Certainly I haven't been deluged
with such replies in response to my recent messages here.
Granted, none of my solutions prevent the user from restoring his non-
digest posting-allowed configuration and then going off on vacation
again, just as unsubscribing someone doesn't prevent him from re-
subscribing and going off on vacation again. Though bouncing all the
autoreply messages back into his mailbox should provide some
incentive for him to fix the problem. (And I suppose in some ways it
might be less friendly than unsubscribing, depending on one's
perspective, mail server quota, etc.)
Ah, but no, these people are evil -- monstrous -- and must be removed
from our sight! Why stop at unsubscribing them? Unsubscribe their
friends; unsubscribe their mothers! Let's mailbomb them with copies
of RFCs on proper mail system practices, until their servers fall
over. That'll teach 'em!
Ken
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf