I know I said I would shut up, but this is a bit of a nit I have to pick.

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Sam Varshavchik <mr...@courier-mta.com>wrote:

> The general idea here is to limit your customer to some reasonable limit,
> say a hundred email messages per hour. A typical customer will never hit it.


This is, IME, false.


> A spammer with a compromised mail account is going to start spamming and
> run into the limit almost right away.
>

This is also, IME, false.

Compromised mail accounts with us typically send few messages to stay below
the radar.

Occasionally, though, they send thousands of messages.

But they do manage to stay below the rate limits.


>
> A slightly different cap is a cap on the number of recipients, rather than
> a number of messages.
>

The number of recipients for each message varies, possibly in order to
probe what the limit is.

Regrettably, e-mail standards specify that you should permit at least 100
recipients, and there are a non-trivial amount of legitimate uses both
slightly below and beyond that.

While rate limiting can act as triggers for an abuse department to notice
something odd going on, it will certainly ring up a lot of false positives.


>
> Most typical customers aren't expected to exceed sending mail to a hundred
> /recipients/ per hour. Occasionally, you'll find someone who manually runs
> a mailing list, off his PC, for some reason, instead of using a proper
> mailing list manager.
>

Using "a proper mailing list manager" is not an option for regular people.
It is an option for people who have a fair bit of technical know-how.

Yes, there are online providers of mailing lists. Regrettably, far too many
of them seem to be rather nonchalant regarding spamming, which means you
can't rely on them. When I use a search engine for finding mailing list
providers, all the top hits are for companies who claim to have strict
anti-spamming measures, but which do not handle or respond to abuse
complaints.

So for a small operation like a club, a society, or just a group of friends
and colleagues with a "list manager", using the good old CC and BCC fields
in the MUA actually makes good sense.
-- 
Jan
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