> From:         DENNIS@UTORGPU
> 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
 
Gee, if they HAD done this, SO MANY problems would have been avoided.
 
> 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?
 
But, there are such things as "de facto" standards.  These are "standards"
that are simply adopted by the users en masse before any committees or
appropriate standardization procedures are adopted.
 
> 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
 
The "standardized" meaning of SENDER: has two subtly different meanings that
in this case need two separate addresses.  There are not enough standardized
field names for all the needs.  Perhaps we should give up the capability to
log the mail into the proper notebook, make LISTSERV send it's returns back
to a special address, and put our kludges in all the mail agent programs to
make them use NEWSGROUPS: to identify the proper notebooks.
 
> 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
 
What the Crosswell mailer forces on LISTSERV is the lack of BSMTP fields
unless one sets up LISTSERV as a "gateway".
 
> 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?
 
Specifically WHAT is wrong with the mailer?????????????????????????????????
 
> 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.
 
If you fix it, I'll consider running it.
 
>
> Bizarre.
 
Yep!
 
> Dennis Ferguson
> University of Toronto