> I fully agree with Harry Williams on this.  The existing standards just
> DO NOT cut it.  A NEW standard to augment what we have now is an absolute
> MUST!!!
 
I disagree.  Let me ask this:  how many loops have you seen that don't
involve LISTSERV?  (I've seen one.  It was mostly my fault, with a
little help from UCLA/Mail and from UCBJADE.  I fixed it.)
 
I know this has been discussed before, but... can anyone convince me
that having LISTSERV put
   Sender:  LISTSERV@node
instead of
   Sender:  listname@node
in outgoing mail will not solve a major fraction of the problems?  The
NONCONFORMING mailers that do not conform to the requirement to send
rejection messages to the Sender if present should be cut off.  It
will be necessary to be mean.  How about this idea: (not totally
facetious!)  LISTSERV keeps a "good guys" list, of nodes where it
trusts the mailer to be reasonable.  Anytime it is about to send mail
to a node that isn't in the "good guys" list, it "pings" the target
mailer first with a test message to a (hopefully) invalid userid, and
watches to see which address the rejection comes back to.  If it
comes back to any address other than the test Sender: address, add the
node to a "bad guys" list and make one attempt to send a notification
to Postpostma@node about his nonforming mailer, and refuse to send any
more mail there.  SUBSCRIBE time might be a better time to do this
check.
 
> This standard MUST be as much a standard as any other existing standard
> so that we will have SOMETHING to "wave in people's faces" when it breaks
> again (and it WILL many more times before we are done).
 
True, but telling someone their mailer is incorrect is not necessarily
going to get them to fix it.  Some sites have to be forced to.  But I
don't think we have to deal with uncooperative sites.  If we refuse to,
the users at those sites will be more successful than we could be at
getting their site management to cause the mailer to be fixed.
 
> Finally, such a standard should take into consideration the impact of
> mailing lists OTHER THAN LISTSERV, especially those on ARPANET.
 
Funny you should mention this.  Have you >ever< seen a loop on an
arpanet mailing list?  I haven't.  (And BTW, it seems to me that most
arpanet mailing lists send the sender a copy of his own posting.  I do
not like the fact that LISTSERV doesn't do this.  I realize that this
is the first line of defense against loops, but wouldn't be necessary
if the Sender: was not unreasonable.)  This is why I claim that the
loop fix must involve some alteration to LISTSERV's *outgoing* mail,
not more/better screens, etc, or more mail headers.  I have not seen
any argument to convince me that a Sender: of the post-to address is
reasonable.  This is what causes 99% of the loops that I've seen.
 
 
/Leonard