Centuries ago, Nostradamus predicted that Greg Troxel would write on Wed Oct 9 07:41:52 2024:
> > "Jay F. Shachter" <j...@m5.chicago.il.us> writes: > >> >> Unrelated to the above -- I sent this message hours ago to the mailing >> list, and the SMTP server at mail.netbsd.org sent me back a 450 error >> because it was greylisting me, which I only noticed a few minutes ago. >> I think it is moronic to greylist people who are on the netbsd-users >> mailing list. Is there any empirical reason why this is being done? >> > > Separately from the technical points addressed by martin@, it's rude > to call this moronic. Setting aside that it is well understood by > anyone who has run a mail system that spam filtering is complicated > and challenging, it's unprofessional language. > You are right. It is unprofessional language. Moreover, inasmuch as I do my own mail filtering (although I do not do my own greylisting), I should be aware of, and more sympathetic to, the difficulty of getting it right the first time (I even have some funny stories I could tell about that, and am resisting the temptation to do so). I publicly apologize for publicly proclaiming that "it is moronic to greylist people who are on the netbsd-users mailing list". Two other people made comments to which I should respond. One considered it likely that I was sending mail in multipart/alternative format. I am not. I generally use elm for outgoing mail, which (even with the enhancements I have added to it) cannot be persuaded to generate mail in multipart/alternative format. If I want to send MIME attachments, I use mailto, which likewise cannot be persuaded to send mail into multipart/alternative format. I truly do not understand why some people send mail with alternative text/plain and text/html formats. Some people even send mail only in text/html format, thus rendering it almost completely unreadable; had I not recently publicly repented of unprofessional language, I would be calling those people utterly moronic. I do not understand why some people think they need either hypertext or markup capabilities in their outgoing mail. If you want to send someone a URL, put the URL in the body of your message, and you can even write "This is a URL" if you believe that the recipient of your message cannot recognize a URL when he sees one. As for markup capabilites, I think you can manage to communicate what you want to say without putting it in different colors or fonts or typefaces or sizes. If you truly cannot, then put your message in a PDF file and send it over as a MIME attachment in application/pdf format. The second person said "Greylisting is harmless and only causes a very small delay in mail delivery. It needs no manual intervention". I do not know what is the source of this person's information, but it is clearly a source into which he has deposited much too much confidence, because his statement is untrue. Greylisting does require manual intervention. I first have to notice that the recipient's MTA returned a 400-level error code, and then I have to manually re-send the mail. If he has written an MTA that automatically re-sends mail that is returned to him with 400-level SMTP errors, or if someone else has written such an MTA for him, so that he does not have to manually intervene when his outgoing messages are greylisted, then good for him. The MUAs that I use (elm and mailto) have been programmed to hand outgoing mail to a Perl script that I wrote that does not (yet) automatically re-send greylisted mail, and thus I have to re-send it myself. Okay, one funny story, but I will restrain myself from telling the others. As I said, I do my own mail filtering. I am a freelance instructor (and a very good one, parenthetically -- you can see a list of all the classes I have taught, one-quarter of which I wrote myself, at http://m5.chicago.il.us/classes.html). I once failed to see -- because it was discarded by my mail-filtering software -- an important e-mail with the title "URGENT: TRAINING SPECIALISTS NEEDED" and in consequence I lost what would have been a lucrative training contract. The reason why this message was discarded by my mail-filtering software is that I used to get, with annoying frequency, e-mail messages offering to sell me pills that promote marital happiness. I therefore wrote mail filtering rules that, inter alia, would discard, unread, any incoming mail with a subject that contained the six-letter brand name of one such pill. The above-quoted subject ("URGENT: TRAINING SPECIALISTS NEEDED") contained that six-letter brand name, and therefore the message was discarded. I later rewrote my mail-filtering rule so that it would discard an incoming message only if that six-letter brand name is surrounded by word separators. I eventually got it right, but I did not get it right on the first try. Getting back to the post that occasioned this discussion in the first place, I have noticed the complained-up phenomenon when the filesystem containing home directories is out of space, because the graphical login creates files and subdirectories underneath the user's home directory, whereas the nongraphical login does not. A followup message on this mailing list stated that the filesystem is not out of space. I have also noticed the complained-up phenomenon on Linux systems that enforce SELinux rules, if the shadow file was most recently recreated on a system without SELinux, because the grapical login requires /etc/shadow to have type shadow_t whereas the nongraphical login does not. This cannot be the case, however, on a NetBSD system. So I am curious to know the explanation of the original poster's complained-of phenomenon, and I hope that the original poster will tell us the explanation, when he discovers it. Jay F. Shachter 6424 North Whipple Street Chicago IL 60645-4111 +1 773 7613784 landline +1 410 9964737 GoogleVoice j...@m5.chicago.il.us http://m5.chicago.il.us "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"
