David Barr wrote:
>In article <[log in to unmask]>,
>Herman Van Uytven  <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>So I wonder what went wrong.  Anyone any idea why PP did send the mail
>>back to the list ?
 
>Because PP is broken.  I see mail from "[log in to unmask]" all
>over Usenet, in groups that are gatewayed to mailing lists.  I have
>tried to send mail to the postmaster to fix the software, but have
>yet to get a response.
 
PP doesn't do that normally as far as I can tell.  I just tested it
with a site that I know is running PP (indeed, I'm going to be working
on its PP over the next little while to do some secure gateway stuff).
This site did the correct thing, and bounced to the correct address.
 
Otherwise, you'd see a LOT more bounces from other sites.  PP is quite
widespread, particularly on very large sites - the site I'm familiar
with has something like 15,000 users, 10,000 machines and is running
about 5 PP MTAs to run the whole shebang - including gatewaying to
proprietary internal mail systems and multiple external networks with
different protocols.
 
I could have sworn I saw mcimail addresses in a format that PP doesn't
support for local names.
 
Mcimail has been a problematic site for quite some time.  I was under
the impression from discussions back when mcimail "got connected" that their
MTA is home-grown.  When you send a piece of mail to mcimail with multiple
recipients at mcimail, if one of the users is nonexistant, it'll bounce
the whole thing and not deliver to anybody - worse, you can't tell from
the bounce which user was at fault.  This is a gross violation of RFC822,
but when contacted (by mailing list owners on the moderators mailing
list), they insisted that their way was the "correct way", and refused
to talk to anyone further.  Several mailing list administrators gave
up on mcimail and refused to subscribe anyone from MCI because it was
giving them too much grief.
 
Perhaps mcimail has switched to PP since then, but anything "bad" you
see like this are probably the result of custom modifications to PP.
 
--
Look on the bright side - at least the PC's reached gender parity!
 
Chris Lewis; [log in to unmask]; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Ferret list: [log in to unmask]