Dave Sill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Yes, there are two questions we have to answer:
>
> 1) Who's doing wrong: AOL or BestServ, and,
>
> 2) What can/should we do about it?
Question (1) is only useful if you have access to, or control over, at least
one of the combatants. In this case we have neither, and it is quite
possible they are both "doing wrong," so it's an unproductive issue except
insofar as it reminds us to be careful out there.
> A handful of disgruntled list managers is unlikely to change AOL's
> behavior, but I think it's important to at least identify the guilty
> party and see if they're aware of the problem and able to fix it.
If it were a BUG or an inadvertent change like a misspelled "Mesage-ID",
sure, even AOL can be reached sooner or later - their techs are people just
like us and they want their stuff to work as designed. However in this case
it appears to be an INTENTIONAL change for security reasons, and the only
thing it breaks is a piece of software that should have known better in the
first place, so my guess is that we would be wasting our time.
Similarly, BestServ was written by a departed programmer from an ISP that
was just swallowed by the Verioborg. There MAY be a chance that somebody
over there understands the code well enough to change to square brackets or
parens or something sane, but maybe not, and it's a closed product, so
Besties could well be SOL.
> Of course, if half of the people on this list don't even agree that
> AOL is wrong to munge subject headers, we're a long way from
> convincing AOL. Maybe when AOL breaks Majordomo, LISTSERV, ezmlm, or
> Mailman, people will see the problem.
I don't care about statements of the form "AOL is wrong," that's the
difference. If WebTV or Prodigy or AOL made some PURPOSEFUL, ostensibly
security-related change that broke Majordomo or Mailman, for example -
although this is unlikely to happen because those are intelligently designed
*open* products that don't make a lot of risky assumptions about the ability
of J. Random User to deliver a precisely formatted reply - we would simply
issue a patch, and spread the word around like wildfire. Got the WebTV
Subject problem with your Majordomo members? Upgrade to 1.94.666 or install
the patch at [URL]... pass it on...
But we can't do that for Best, because they made the "business decision"
[insert eye roll here] to hand-craft a proprietary quasi-clone of the
standard MLM's, with its own variant control language and procedures, and no
listadmin access to the code. And as anyone could have predicted, two
things happened: [1] as a proprietary program, it eventually ran out of
development gas and stood still while the open-source originals continued to
evolve around it in a changing email world; [2] the author wizard moved on,
leaving an orphaned package to be maintained by people with other jobs to do
who don't really know the code.
As I say, if I were a BestServ admin I would probably be porting my lists
now. It's not like there aren't alternatives, even on Verio hosts. Or
MAYBE someone at Best - or its new masters - can take a look at the code and
put up a fix. It's probably a two line change, one for the emitter and one
for the recognition parser. With a closed system, if they make the change,
it's done for everyone.
