Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 08:18:46 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Curmudgeonly rant re: mailing lists and "UNIX vs. Microsoft" Message-ID: <199909091518.IAA54100@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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I understand that some folks here in -newbies come from a Microsoft- oriented environment, and that there is, upon occasion, an "attitude" expressed by those of us who identify more with UNIX environments, in which the Microsoft-oriented environments are viewed as inferior, at least for some purposes. Although the below sample may merely be a result of an unfortunate misconfiguration -- which it's certainly possible to accomplish with nearly any type of system, and exceedingly easy to do with a UNIX system -- it is Yet Another in a series of such things that I have encountered over the years. And I believe that it illustrates something that I find rather exasperating. I should point out a little about perspective, here: I (still) consider email to be important -- probably the single most important user-visible application that uses the Net. (I still have a bit of a hard time believing that this Web stuff will ever be more than a "flash in the pan".) Yeah, I'm *that* old. :-) And an important aspect of email is the ability to have and use mailing lists, such as freebsd-newbies. Indeed, back when I ran a (free) public-access UNIX system from home, whose only connection to the outside world was via a couple of dial-up lines for direct login or UUCP, I wanted to run a mailing list. And for a while, I merely used the "aliases" file, but that became unwieldy. So I prowled around, and found some hints and suggestions about how such things ought to behave; then Karl Kleinpaste (then at Ohio State University) provided some sample code (which I butchered to unrecognizability), and I hd a crude but servicable mailing list. (I doubt that many here would have been involved in the topic; it was relating to the joys and issues involved in writing code in C on the IBM s/370-architecture mainframes; I had been working as an MVS systems programmer for a few years by that time.) Nowadays I tend to use majordomo... but the point is that I happen to have a fairly long, in-depth association with email and mailing lists. And I learned quite some time ago that there are some things that Just Are Not Done (at least, in polite company). For example: * Sending administrivia matters to the list. * Blindly setting up bidirectional news<->mailing list gateways. * Failing to have a working "postmaster" mailbox at any site that sends mail. * Sending bounce-o-grams to the list. * Sending bounce-o-grams to the message originator, instead of the list maintainer. What follows is a fairly classic example of that last faux pas, with the added distinction(?) that the individual mailbox that catalyzed the problem has been sufficiently obscured that identifying the individual address could be moderately challenging: were I maintaining the list in question (freebsd-newbies, as it happens), it might be necessary to drop all addresses at the entire site. (Granted, there may only be one, or there may be a small enough number that the correspondence between RFC 822-style addresses and whatever format these folks use can be determined... but running a mailing list is, at best, a thankless job. Making it harder is Not Good.) In fairness, I haven't tried sending a note to postmaster@cwhkt.com, but I have often found that sites that create such messes often fail to have a responsive postmaster. (Sometimes they have a mailbox for that function, but choose to name it something whimsical, such as "admin" or "mailman", rather than the RFC 822-mandated "postmaster". Since few of us possess clairvoyance, this is of little use to a mailing list administrator, or anyone else trying to reach someone at the site in question.) So if anyone is still reading, this is an example of something that is fairly annoying (to me): I had sent a response to freebsd-newbies, and one of the addresses on -newbies apparently gets converted at some gateway to "CWCWAREG/IDDMMM01/INDARTO", but the RFC 822 version of that "address" (if that's what that construct really is) isn't elucidated. And the bounce-o-gram was sent to me, as message originator, as opposed to the mailing list maintainer (whose address would show up on the "envelope-from"). >From IMCEAMS-CWCWAREG_IDDMMM01_POSTMASTER@cwhkt.com Thu Sep 9 05:06:37 1999 >[internal Received: headers elided -- dhw] >Received: (from smap@localhost) > by gatekeeper.whistle.com (8.8.8/8.8.7) id FAA08734 > for <dhw@whistle.com>; Thu, 9 Sep 1999 05:04:05 -0700 (PDT) > (envelope-from IMCEAMS-CWCWAREG_IDDMMM01_POSTMASTER@cwhkt.com) >Message-Id: <199909091204.FAA08734@gatekeeper.whistle.com> >Received: from imc01.cwhkt.com(imc01.hkt.com 202.84.162.83) by gatekeeper.whistle.com via smap (V2.0) > id xma008732; Thu, 9 Sep 99 05:03:54 -0700 >Received: by HKGMSX11 with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) > id <SBCGD7SR>; Thu, 9 Sep 1999 20:07:05 +0800 >From: CWCWAREG/IDDMMM01/POSTMASTER > <IMCEAMS-CWCWAREG_IDDMMM01_POSTMASTER@cwhkt.com> >To: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> >Subject: Mail failure >Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 19:48:00 +0800 >MIME-Version: 1.0 >X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) >Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="iso-8859-1" > > >[002] Mail was received that was addressed to unknown addresses. >Mail item was not delivered to: > CWCWAREG/IDDMMM01/INDARTO > >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >-- >Microsoft Mail v3.0 (MAPI 1.0 Transport) IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note >From: David Wolfskill >To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG > osc20@yahoo.com >Subject: Re: difference between freebsd & linux >Date: 1999-09-08 22:32 >Priority: 3 >Message ID: DA5B0223DC65D3119DDF00A0C9E1E018 > > >[body of my message to -newbies elided; you've probably already seen > it. -- dhw] Mind you, this kind of behavior isn't confined to Microsoft -- I also have seen it (and variations on the theme) in cc:Mail, Lotus, VMS, and LISTSERVs. (Speaking of the latter, I get so many brain-dead whines from the LISTSERV at ZDEMAIL.COM about nonexistent mailboxes -- and no response to my messages back to postmaster -- that I can't help but wonder how they function. Oh, well.) But rarely do I find a UNIX site doing this. Of course, with the growing popularity of UNIX[-like] OSs on commodity hardware, this could change.... :-( Hope someone found some of this interesting, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (888) 347-0197 FAX: (650) 372-5915 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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