FYI
 
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Brief recap of a situation:
 
I maintain the Info-Stratus mailing list, which is based on an Internet
host.  An America OnLine user was subscribed to the Info-Stratus list.
For some reason, during a recent weekend his mailbox became unavailable
for delivery of electronic mail.
 
When the inbound message from the mailing list was bounced back, it was
sent back to the RFC822 "Reply-To:" address.  This was set up to be the
address of the mailing list, so an infinite mail loop occurred, which
required manual intervention to stop.  The looped messages were also
propagated automatically into the Usenet newsgroup "comp.sys.stratus".
 
It seems that the America OnLine Internet e-mail gateway violates
protocol and convention in this behavior, and initially the technical
staff of AOL did not respond to my complaint.
 
In article <[log in to unmask]>,
     [log in to unmask] (Dave Saunders) writes:
>
> One item to note is that AOL asked users to not subscribe to *any*
> mailing list mail when they announced their Internet Mail gateway.
 
I have now received an UNofficial communication about the policies of
America OnLine (AOL) and the "aol.com" domain.  This comes from Mike
Ward <[log in to unmask]>, who is the "Internet Mail Gateway Discussion
Board host", which I suppose is equivalent to a "sysop" or "conference
moderator" in the parlance of some other commercial online systems.  He
is therefore not an on-site member of the AOL staff.
 
Mike sent the following:
|
|  Here's the text on the topic in the AOL Internet mail help area -
|
|  "America Online does not support Internet mailing lists because of the
|  large volume of incoming mail these lists generate.  Please do not
|  subscribe to any mailing lists using your America Online address."
 
Regardless of this user policy, it is still uncivilized to violate the
protocols of the network.  Mike did agree to forward my complaint to the
people who maintain the AOL gateway.
 
Dave Saunders also writes:
>
> AOL is not *on* the Internet, but has either a UUCP or SLIP account with
> PSI to get their mail.
 
Judging from the SMTP mail headers, it must be SLIP.
 
> This is not high speed networking folks and they should not be expected to
> handle that kind of mail traffic for their customers. Of course they should
> fix their mailer, but on the other hand they never said you could safely use
> mailing lists now did they?
 
As a mere mailing-list maintainer, I have no practical way to find out
what the gateway capacities or administrative policies of America OnLine
are.  Nevertheless, I have dropped all subscriptions to AOL users, and I
suggest that all mailing-list maintainers on the Internet be similarly
prudent, if your list address appears in the "Reply-To:" field.
 
--
 ...Richard S. Shuford  | "A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge,
 [log in to unmask]  |  but the simple keep going and suffer for it."
 ...Info-Stratus contact|  Proverbs 22:3 NIV