As I told tale in private email, that's overly generous. For example,
suppose someone were to send me a BCC or a CC of a mail they also sent
to faq-maintainers (like Nancy McGough did), perhaps because they
wanted a quick reply from me personally.
In this case the pattern above would match both copies of the message,
and so both would be sent into my mail->news gateway and perhaps not
read for a week or two or even be expired before I got around to
reading them - clearly undesirable.
The way I get around this at the moment is by attempting to do some
vague matching on Received: lines (!). This means that messages from
people at MIT are apt to be misrouted, but not most others.
Unfortunately this doesn't cope well with changes in system
configurations or even with temporary outages.
> For more info about filtering mail see:
> <URL:http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/mail/filtering-faq/faq.html>
I'm well-able to write procmail recipies, thanks. I'll send you
copies of my .procmailrc's if you don't believe me. Unfortunately
distinguishing messages that reach me via faq-maintainers from others
is technically impossible in principle, and doing it reliably is
impossible in practice.
pshuang@MIT.EDU writes ("Some administrative issues"):
> (1) A reminder about bounces: yes, we know that most of you who have
> sent messages to the mailing list see a bunch of bounces. The mailing
> list policy (sent to you upon subscription, and also periodically
> mailed to the mailing lists) specifically notes that we know about the
> bounces problem, and that we even know the technical solution, but we
> cannot easily apply the technical solution because we do not control
> the software configuration on the local mail hubs. So there's no
> point in sending us email asking about whether we can do anything. :)
If I understand you correctly you're wrong, I'm afraid. Your mailing
list software is propagating the SMTP envelope information through
itself; it could just as easily replace it with something more helpful
(such as owner-faq-maintainers@mit.edu).
I can see only two things that could make it impossible for you to fix
things: the first is if you have no control over what mailing list
software you run (which seems very odd). The second would be if the
local mailhubs don't honour or pass on SMTP envelope information when
generating bounces and instead use the From: field or something
similar. If the latter is the case those mailhubs are in greivous
violation of the RFC's and should be fixed pronto as they'll be
causing lots of other misdirected bounces.
> However, at this time, we would be interested in hearing back from
> anyone on the faq-maintainers mailing list who can offer access to a
> long-term stable mailing list server, such that either they would be
> willing to take over maintaining mailing lists for us, or such that we
> would be able to maintain the mailing lists directly. Offers should
> be sent to us at faq-maintainers-request@mit.edu.
Why not just replace the software ? I'm subscribed to numerous lists
that use a free package called `majordomo', and it appears to be
reliable and do all the right things. Furthermore it allows automatic
sub- and unsubscription.
Ian.
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