In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, you wrote:
>Probe messages work only if the refusing site sends you back the text, or
>sends you back your outgoing subject, or at least returns something that
>distinguishes one probe message from the others. Prodigy tells you only that
>such-and-such a user ID is not valid: no text, no Received: headers for the
>trip from your site to Prodigy, no trace of your Subject:, nothing. You're
>not going to know that it is probe #0001347 that one of your subscribers
>forwarded to the invalid address if you put the identifier in the subject
>or the text. (If the bouncing site returns headers, it will also return
>your outgoing To:, which should also tell you. Of course your list distri-
>butions won't show To: each subscriber, but your probe messges will.)
Speaking of ``probes'', I have just been dealing with a problem on my end
that is rather annoying and which seems to be due to some rather glaring
stupidity on the part of those folks who developed the Listserv package.
(Is that Lsoft, Inc.?)
I've altered one of the mail servers on one of my domains so that it returns
(at the SMTP level) some rather chatty, verbose, and in your face prose for
cases of badly admins mailing lists where the admins of the respective lists
seem to have been failing for long periods of time to remove bouncing and
dysfunctional/defunct addresses within my domain(s). Obviously, this causes
these response message to get past whatever pre-filtering some boneheaded
list admins have setup to help them ignore those annoying ``ordinary''
bounce message and so now, some of these turkeys are actually starting the
process of removing some of these long defunct subscriber addresses.
The problem is that 9apparently) Listserv cane be told (by the list owner)
to perform some sort of a ``probe'' on a given address which may be bad,
and it will then go and try to do that.
Now get this... if the probe FAILS... which is to say if the address is
in fact bad... then it appears that Listserv then tries to send a ``probe
failed'' message TO THE ADDRESS THAT JUST FAILED!
No, I'm not making this up.
That doesn't bother me so much as the WAY in which these idiotic ``probe
failed'' messages are sent... They appear to be sent with a null/empty
envelope return address, thus making them (in some ways related to spam
filtering) indistinguishable from ordinary Mailer-Daemon bounces for mail
which was sent *from* my system to someplace else.
It seems to me that this is beyond moronic. Up till now I really believed
that there were only two uses for null envelope return addresses, i.e. for
sending back E-mail bounce messages and for spamming.
If anybody wants to explain to me why my criticisms of Listserv are unfound-
ed, I'm all ears.
-- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc.
-- Deadbolt(tm) Personal E-Mail Filter demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/deadbolt/
-- Wpoison (web harvester poisoning) - demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/
