A Plea to Mailing / News Forwarding List Maintainers

[George Robbins]

It appears that there a number of sites gatewaying the comp.unix.ultrix
newsgroup into mailing lists.  This is fine, however some of them are
not taking adequate precautions about either errors or out of date
information in their redistribution lists.

This results in a number of problems:

1) the poster of the article receives "error messages" about mail delivery
   to some random site in the universe.  He donsn't care and can't do
   anything about it.

2) articles with bad addresses or otherwise mangled header information
   loop in the redistibution lists or back into the newsgroup resulting
   in (sometimes multiply) duplicated postings.

If you run such a gateway, please make sure that when you forward the
usenet articles, that the headers are improved such that errors are
returned to the postmaster or list maintainer at the forwarding site
and not to the original poster or the list itself.

I don't claim to be an expert in network mailers, however the following
are probably adequate to cover most cases:

1) Delete the "From:" header line and replace it with one like:
   "From: ultrix-list-errors at gateway.site" or some other alias for the
   list maintainer or a data sink.  The "Reply-To:" header contains the
   information needed for _people_ to send mail to to original poster.
   
2) Add the unofficial, but often effective "Errors-To:" header line,
   with the same sort of information.

3) Try not mess with the original "Message-Id:" header since this
   prevents duplication if the article re-enters the usenet news
   system.  This may or may not be possible depending on your mailer.


The bad guys recently have been:

decuac / info-ultrix-fwd - sending back messages about non-existant
				users and systems.

carleton.ca / ca.gateway - sending back messsages about network
				congestion and such problems.

eurokom? - shows up the "Message-Id:" of one very mangled article
		that is apparently looping in some of the distribution
		lists or at least being (mis)delivered multiple times.


I will attempt to copy this to the postmasters at decuac and carleton.ca,
however there is nothing I can do about the looping article, hopefully it
will vanish of it's own accord sooner or later.

As usual, comments about or corrections to this posting are appreciated...

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,	uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing	arpa: cbmvax!grr at uunet.uu.net
Commodore, Engineering Department	fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)