> UUCP can be a valid userid on a non-UNIX system.  Does UUCP put any reasonable
> text in the message subject to hint that it is a rejection message?  UUCP node
> have been a MAJOR source of pain in the past because their rejection messages
> are made to not look like them.
 
I have never seen a standard or widely-held convention which suggested what
rejection messages were supposed to look like.  I have never seen a standard
or widely-held convention which attributed any particular syntax or semantics
to the contents of the Subject: header other than commentary.  How can UUCP
rejection messages not look like rejection messages when there is no standard
or widely-held convention for what a rejection message is supposed to look
like?
 
UUCP mailers, like Internet mailers, send rejection messages to the return
address in the envelope.  This address will have been derived from the
MAIL FROM:<> address in the BSMTP envelope at the gateway.  The proper,
standard solution is to avoid having the rejection note sent back to the
list altogether by including an envelope return address which points
elsewhere.
 
LISTSERV, unfortunately, does not follow this standard practice.  Instead
it sends messages with the envelope address pointing back at the list and
impliments a bag of kludges to try to separate the rejection messages out
(though, to be fair, I also understand that this is forced on LISTSERV by
another bag of kludges, the Crosswell mailer).  I know this not because I
am any sort of mail expert, but rather because (a) I can see the message
envelope return addresses on this machine and can see that Internet mailing
lists are done differently than LISTSERV lists, and (b) it has been mentioned
so many times here and elsewhere (just today I saw several notes complaining
about this on the TCP-IP list) that I can recite the liturgy of BITNET mail
problems almost by heart.
 
Thus, expecting every UUCP site through which a message from LISTSERV might
ever pass to modify their rejection notices to suit LISTSERV, and/or
complaining about them when they send rejection messages that don't suit
LISTSERV, to make up for your defective MTA is more than a little parochial.
The real solutions, in order of preference, are (1) fix the damn mailer,
(2) fix the damn mailer, (3) fix the damn mailer, or (4) add yet another
kludge to LISTSERV to detect this week's problem rejection message.  Want
to bet which fix is applied, if any?
 
I have a prediction, that by 1990 the only machines running LISTSERV will
be otherwise unused 3090's since the reject filter will be so large that
only these machines will have enough CPU to move the mail.  And, at the
same time, every VM site will *still* be using the same broken version of the
Crosswell mailer that they're running now (if they even understand BSMTP
by then), and LISTSERV will still be sending stuff out with the wrong envelope
address.
 
Bizarre.
 
Dennis Ferguson
University of Toronto