From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 00:31:08 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id AAA02904; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 00:24:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.vjs.org (cc50165-b.hwrd1.md.home.com [24.9.159.241]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id AAA02897 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 00:24:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from [192.168.1.5] (192.168.1.5) by mail.vjs.org with ESMTP (Eudora Internet Mail Server 2.2); Thu, 2 Mar 2000 03:34:33 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <73532.951850849@monkeys.com> References: <73532.951850849@monkeys.com> X-Organization: Little to None X-Mailer: Eudora 5.0 for Cray T3E-1200 Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 03:26:40 -0500 To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Vince Sabio Subject: Re: A lesson about verifying transferred lists Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk ** Sometime around 11:00 -0800 02/29/2000, Ronald F. Guilmette sent us: >Sharon Tucci wrote: > > >{... list transfer story snipped...} > > >The number of bounces was what we expected - about 8-9%... > >Actually, that sounds rather high to me. > >If the old list hosting company _was_ actually cleaning out bouncing >addresses, why would you expect more than (say) 3-4%, tops? I disagree -- and not [just] because it's fun to disagree with you, Ron. Consider the fact that the list had been dormant for two months; that's plenty of time for a considerable number of e-mail addresses to go bad. If this had been mailed to within the past couple of weeks, I'd agree with your 3-4% figure. But 8-9% is pretty reasonable after a two-month hiatus IMO. (Speaking as a list owner for whom a two-month hiatus is pretty common.) __________________________________________________________________________ Vince Sabio Got Bounces? vince@vjs.org Got Jokes? Got Spam? From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 00:46:08 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id AAA02895; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 00:23:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.vjs.org (cc50165-b.hwrd1.md.home.com [24.9.159.241]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id AAA02888 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 00:23:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from [192.168.1.5] (192.168.1.5) by mail.vjs.org with ESMTP (Eudora Internet Mail Server 2.2); Thu, 2 Mar 2000 03:34:25 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200002291636.LAA23582@tor-srs1.netcom.ca> References: <200002291636.LAA23582@tor-srs1.netcom.ca> X-Organization: Little to None X-Mailer: Eudora 5.0 for Cray T3E-1200 Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 03:22:40 -0500 To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Vince Sabio Subject: Re: A lesson about verifying transferred lists Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk ** Sometime around 11:37 -0500 02/29/2000, Sharon Tucci sent us: Just to provide another opinion/data point here ... >We >received one complaint direct to us from someone who, when we >questioned it, said they didn't recognize the list address. >(Given that the list was moved to our service, the list address >would have obviously changed.) > >The welcome message provided removal information and about 2% >unsubscribed. > >Because of the high unsubscribe rate and the complaint, WHAT??? First of all, 2% is not at all a "high unsubscribe rate," especially for a list that has been dormant for a couple of months. I'd expect the unsubscribe rate to be higher than that. And ONE complaint out of 4000? And you even pointed out yourself that the subscriber was probably confused by the domain change. >we went >back to the client and said the only way we could handle their >list was if everyone was required to opt-in once again. I believe you overreacted, though there's certainly no harm in it. At least, not at this point ... >Client agreed - saying that they want to make sure that the list is >clean and 100% opt-in. This client is more forgiving than most. >We did the two step with 20000 additional subscribers. Each >person received one email telling them that the list was being >moved to our service and that we required people to confirm >their subscription... so in order to receive future messages, >they would need to hit reply to the verification message. > >Here's where the fun starts. Of the 20,000, again, the >number of bounces was normal - what we had expected. However, >we've received three spam complaints in less than 24 hours. >So, in total, we've received more spam complaints from about >24,000 recipients than we normally do in 6 months across >hundreds of new lists. This is, as Dave pointed out, totally insignificant. I run a large mailing list with a confirmation loop, and I *still* routinely (well, a coupla times a year) receive "complaints" from people who claim that I am spamming them. My guess is, most often it's a child or a sibling or even a friend who has access to the mailbox and does the subscribing -- possibly as a joke -- and the poor clueless mailbox owner then starts receiving what he thinks is spam. Many seem to be too daft to figure out the unsubscription instructions that are included in the footer of EVERY message (most probably don't read down that far), and it's easier to simply reply and tell me that I'm spamming them. I have a form letter I send them which includes unsubscription instructions; I rarely hear from them again. Three such complaints on a newly-moved list out of more than 18,000 delivered e-mails isn't even worth noting, Sharon. >The problem is what do we do about this? Move his list. If it helps you sleep at night, require everyone to re-up to the list. But I think even that is an overreaction. The numbers you've quoted are really pretty good. >to handle the re-opt-in process themselves. But my gut won't >let me advise this because I really do think that the list >has been seeded with email addresses who haven't opted in. I think your complaint rate would be MUCH higher if that were the case. >FWIW, we had two other situations where lists provided >by other list hosting services had addresses on the list >that shouldn't have been there. With both situations, it >was a single email address that should have been removed >that wasn't. Sharon, no list of any reasonable size will be 100%. As I said, even confirmation loops aren't perfect; if someone else has access to the mailbox, then all bets are off. __________________________________________________________________________ Vince Sabio Got Bounces? vince@vjs.org Got Jokes? Got Spam? From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 05:46:04 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id FAA08281; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 05:34:38 -0800 (PST) Received: from bangkok.digi-net.com ([63.75.34.110]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id FAA08274 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 05:34:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from [209.212.133.114] (unverified [209.212.133.114]) by bangkok.digi-net.com (Rockliffe SMTPRA 3.4.6) with SMTP id for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 08:52:20 -0500 Message-ID: Subject: Re: A lesson about verifying transferred lists Date: Thu, 2 Mar 00 08:42:19 -0500 x-sender: tanny@63.75.34.110 x-mailer: Claris Emailer 1.1 From: tanny To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk >>we went >>back to the client and said the only way we could handle their >>list was if everyone was required to opt-in once again. > >I believe you overreacted, though there's certainly no harm in it. At >least, not at this point ... I must say I have some sympathy with Sharons concern regarding complaints generated from her new clients list. I think it's important to recognize there is a difference between being the owner of a handful of lists, and a host for many paying clients. I would also keep in mind that no ISP I've ever met has the time or inclination to launch a detailed investigation in to a specific spam complaint. Rather, they judge you by the volume of complaints they receive about you, without a lot of regard to the exact validity of any specific complaint. Anyone who is now inclined to advise me to get a new ISP would receive this question: Can I put the 600,000 sometimes irrational readers we serve on your T-1? What's your comfort level with death threats? :-) I wouldn't care to advise Sharon on exactly how she should respond to this particular situation, she knows her business better than I obviously. But I do have an appreciation of the fact that someone in her position has to take all complaints, valid or invalid, very seriously. Logic and common sense is a poor guide to this issue in my experience. Phil From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 09:46:40 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id JAA10696; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 09:35:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from hostigos.otherwhen.com (mavery-gw.pernet.net [205.229.2.17]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id JAA10689 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 09:35:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.otherwhen.com (mavery2.pernet.net [205.229.2.19]) by hostigos.otherwhen.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA18742 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:43:48 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from mavery@mail.otherwhen.com) Received: from PORKY/SpoolDir by mail.otherwhen.com (Mercury 1.47); 2 Mar 00 11:46:06 -0600 Received: from SpoolDir by PORKY (Mercury 1.47); 2 Mar 00 11:45:53 -0600 From: "Mike Avery" To: Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:45:47 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: A lesson about verifying transferred lists Reply-to: mavery@mail.otherwhen.com Message-ID: <38BE5471.12245.D9E0D05@localhost> In-reply-to: X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On 2 Mar 2000, at 8:42, tanny wrote: > >>we went > >>back to the client and said the only way we could handle their > >>list was if everyone was required to opt-in once again. > >I believe you overreacted, though there's certainly no harm in it. At > > least, not at this point ... > I must say I have some sympathy with Sharons concern regarding > complaints generated from her new clients list. > I think it's important to recognize there is a difference between > being the owner of a handful of lists, and a host for many paying > clients. I would also keep in mind that no ISP I've ever met has the > time or inclination to launch a detailed investigation in to a > specific spam complaint. Rather, they judge you by the volume of > complaints they receive about you, without a lot of regard to the > exact validity of any specific complaint. > Anyone who is now inclined to advise me to get a new ISP would receive > this question: Can I put the 600,000 sometimes irrational readers we > serve on your T-1? What's your comfort level with death threats? > :-) > I wouldn't care to advise Sharon on exactly how she should respond to > this particular situation, she knows her business better than I > obviously. But I do have an appreciation of the fact that someone in > her position has to take all complaints, valid or invalid, very > seriously. Logic and common sense is a poor guide to this issue in > my experience. Well.... Vince has excellent experience and has been around mailing lists a long time. I host a number of lists. One of the moderators has slowed down of late. And, as a result, I think Vince is right. People lose interest. People change ISP's. People forget stuff. So... let's imagine we lowered the curtain on this list for two months. And then we moved it to a new provider, let's say onelist.com. And then we sent out a note on the list. Suddenly, even though the first message started out with, "Hi, we've moved to OneList!", the stuff would hit the fan. If the switch-over coincided with a semester break, the "death rate" would be higher - schools change student accounts, companies move their staff to coincide with school schedules - so somewhere from 2 to 8 percent of the addresses would become invalid and bounce. If you have software (like Vince's) that handles bounces, that's background noise. More will forget that they were ever in a list called List-Managers. And some will get pissy because it's on OneList now. So there will be hate mail. Even on lists that have had no hiatus I've had people write me that they've been trying to unsubscribe for two years (note... unsubing is easy, and each message has instructions in it... I imagine them hunkered over their keyboard for two years, "No, I can't come to bed yet, I haven't managed to unsubscribe from this list!!!") There is a reason old Unix admins call 'em lusers. I don't think after two months of no service a 2% bounce rate, or even 8%, is all that high. And two complaints isn't bad either. I recently dealt with a company that had been harvesting email addresses from their web page for several years without using them. It is a software house that markets a fairly well regarded email package. They needed to inform people that there was a Y2K issue, and how to resolve it. Many people put in bad email addresses. Many people moved in the two years. I had over a 30% bounce rate. And many angry complaints. "Who are you? How did you get my name?" *sigh* One person tried to get me in trouble with my ISP. I have been dealing with them for years, so I called 'em and explained. Another turned me into orbs. Since I don't relay, I'm not listed there. Y'know... the levels of problems dealt the first poster had to deal with just don't seem that severe to me.... they sound like a vacation! Mike (Who won't handle another mass mailing like that one...) -- Mike Avery MAvery@mail.otherwhen.com (409)-842-2942 (voice) (409)-842-4352 (FAX) ICQ: 16241692 * Spam is for lusers who can't get business any other way * A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: Hane's Law: There is no limit to how bad things can get. From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 10:46:53 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA11253; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 10:32:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA11246 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 10:32:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from monkeys.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA81634 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 10:42:22 -0800 (PST) To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: A lesson about verifying transferred lists In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 02 Mar 2000 03:26:40 -0500. Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 10:42:22 -0800 Message-ID: <81632.952022542@monkeys.com> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk In message , Vince Sabio wrote: >** Sometime around 11:00 -0800 02/29/2000, Ronald F. Guilmette sent us: >>Sharon Tucci wrote: >> >> >{... list transfer story snipped...} >> >> >The number of bounces was what we expected - about 8-9%... >> >>Actually, that sounds rather high to me. >> >>If the old list hosting company _was_ actually cleaning out bouncing >>addresses, why would you expect more than (say) 3-4%, tops? > >I disagree -- and not [just] because it's fun to disagree with you, >Ron. Consider the fact that the list had been dormant for two months; >that's plenty of time for a considerable number of e-mail addresses >to go bad. > >If this had been mailed to within the past couple of weeks, I'd agree >with your 3-4% figure. But 8-9% is pretty reasonable after a >two-month hiatus IMO. (Speaking as a list owner for whom a two-month >hiatus is pretty common.) Agreed. (I didn't see any mention of a ``two month hiatus'' in the original message, but perhaps I just missed it. Anyway, yes, after 2 months, 8-9% might go bad.) From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 11:31:04 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA11729; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:25:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA11717 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:25:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from monkeys.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA81756; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:35:06 -0800 (PST) To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Cc: postmaster@qualcomm.com, webmaster@qualcomm.com, eudora-pr@qualcomm.com, eudora-custserv@qualcomm.com, eudora-sales@qualcomm.com Subject: Mailing Lists Done Right (for a change) Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 11:35:06 -0800 Message-ID: <81754.952025706@monkeys.com> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Amazingly, just a couple of days after I posted to List-Managers my comments regarding what should and (more importantly) what should not be contained in an initial greeting message (or a subscriber confirmation or re-confirmation message) from any given mailing list, I received the message below from Qualcomm. The message below was definitely triggered by my act of having downloaded the latest version of Eudora recently. (I did that recently.) This is a wonderful example of how to do things right, and I want to com- pliment the people at Qualcomm for taking the time to do it right. Please look at the following message, and as you do, please note that: o It is essentially devoid of anything that could be construed as ``advertising copy''. (Good!) o It indicates that if I *do not* respond in any way, my ``profile'' will be automatically deleted from their records within two weeks. (Good!) o It goes the extra mile to give me detailed information about how/ where/when my e-mail address got onto their list. Specifically, it provides the exact date, time, and IP address from whence this subscription originated. (GOOD!) This information is, of course, critical for tracking down the perp, when/if someone is using Qualcomm's web sign-up form to repeatedly harass me. It is worthy of note also that the message *does not* start off with a bunch of incomprehensible HTML gibberish. (Good!) Also worthy of note is the fact that the message was sent using an ordinary (non-variable) envelope sender address (eudora-profile@qualcomm.com). Thus, if for any reason I was to consider these mailings inappropriate, I could very easily block them all (in my MTA or in a sufficiently sophisticated MDA, e.g. procmail) _without_ having to block all mail from the entire qualcomm.com domain. (Good!) (People using variable envelope sender addresses take note! You may perhaps want to set-aside a separate subdomain of your main domain... like for example foobar-list.example.com... for your mailings so as to make it easier for any postmaster who wants to block all foobar-list traffic to do so WITHOUT also blocking all mail from your entire domain.) Again, I want to compliment Qualcomm for providing a proof by example that mailing lists can indeed be run both responsibly and with sincere concern and thought for the desires of the recipient. Ron Guilmette P.S. I also give Qualcomm extra points for injecting a bit of levity into the first paragraph. P.P.S. When Qualcom mentions ``customizing ads'' in the first paragraph, they are almost certainly talking about the ads one would see IF one elected to actually use their new `free' version of Eudora, which, as I understand it, allows you free use of the product in exchange for your eyeballs... a fair bargain. I don't believe that there is any implication here that Qualcomm is going to start blasting ads my way... at least not until I myself `opt-in' by electing to use the free version of their product. ------- Forwarded Message Return-Path: eudora-profile@qualcomm.com Received: from e-scrub.com (e-scrub.com [207.126.97.39]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id FAA80077 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 05:21:09 -0800 (PST) From: eudora-profile@qualcomm.com Received: from adserver.eudora.com (adserver.eudora.com [208.48.73.150]) by e-scrub.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA18684 for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 23:37:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from adserver.eudora.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by adserver.eudora.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA22246 for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 23:34:21 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 23:34:21 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <200003020734.XAA22246@adserver.eudora.com> To: rfg+eudora@MONKEYS.COM Reply-to: eudora-comments@qualcomm.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Eudora Profile Information for rfg+eudora@monkeys.com Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="isw6jFG_lLUCmdEQMBGX6yjD2zRXkkM" X-Original-Recipient: RFC822;rfg+2Beudora@monkeys.com - --isw6jFG_lLUCmdEQMBGX6yjD2zRXkkM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Thank you for filling out our survey and downloading Eudora. The survey information will be used by Eudora for customizing the ads it displays so that they better match your interests and your demographic profile. The way we do this is by associating a Profile ID with your information. We do it this way to ensure your privacy. With the Profile ID, you are just a number to us. :-) We don't associate your profile with your name or email address. Here is the URL for our Privacy Policy . WINDOWS USERS: By now, you should have received a dialog asking you to accept your Profile ID. If you clicked the "OK" button, you have nothing more to do. If you clicked the "Cancel" button, your Profile ID will not have been accepted, and Eudora will not be able to customize ads for you. If for any reason you think you need to reenter your profile ID (for example, you clicked "Cancel" in the dialog, or you installed Eudora on a new computer), please click this link and press "OK" in the dialog that follows: . MACINTOSH USERS: By now, you should have received a dialog asking you to accept your profile ID. If you clicked "You have my permission", you have nothing more to do. If you clicked "No thanks" in the dialog, your profile ID will not have been accepted, and Eudora will not be able to customize ads for you. If for any reason you think you need to reenter your profile ID (for example, you clicked "No thanks" in the dialog, or you installed Eudora on a new computer), please double-click the attachment at the bottom of this message, and press "You have my permission" in the dialog that follows. ALL USERS: If you wish to remove or update your profile, please use the Customize the Ads You See button in the Payment & Registration window, which is available from the Help menu. Please save this message for future reference. You completed the survey on Fri, 18 Feb 2000 09:08:36 -0800, from the host [206.14.136.180]. If you do not accept this profiling information, it will expire two weeks from the date that you completed the survey. - --isw6jFG_lLUCmdEQMBGX6yjD2zRXkkM Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=Profile.dat Content-Type: application/vnd.eudora.data; regcode=yes Eudora-File-Type: profile Profile: -------------------------------- Profile-Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 09:08:36 -0800 Profile-Address: rfg+eudora@monkeys.com Profile-Source-Agent: sendprofiles 1.0.3 - --isw6jFG_lLUCmdEQMBGX6yjD2zRXkkM-- ------- End of Forwarded Message From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 14:01:06 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA13095; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 13:48:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from avocet.prod.itd.earthlink.net (avocet.prod.itd.earthlink.net [207.217.121.50]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id NAA13088 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 13:48:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from lw1 (dialup-209.244.177.111.NewYork2.Level3.net [209.244.177.111]) by avocet.prod.itd.earthlink.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id NAA16012; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 13:58:49 -0800 (PST) Reply-To: From: "Tom Baurley" To: Subject: changing confirm process in majordomo Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 16:58:28 -0500 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600 In-Reply-To: <200003020900.BAA03296@honor.greatcircle.com> Importance: Normal Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Greetings - We are in desperate search for a method to change the confirm message that comes with Majordomo -- does anyone know how to do this? Also is it possible to still run confirm but get rid of the approval code? We want it to be able to be approved by simply replying to the email. Please help if you know how as no one on the other majordomo lists we belong have replied. Thanks, Tom Baurley From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 2 16:46:04 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA14761; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 16:38:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id QAA14753 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 16:38:09 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 13666 invoked by uid 100); 2 Mar 2000 19:48:49 -0500 Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 19:48:47 -0500 (EST) From: John R Levine To: tom@baurley.com cc: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: changing confirm process in majordomo In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > We are in desperate search for a method to change the confirm message that > comes with Majordomo -- does anyone know how to do this? The text is in the majordomo perl script, it's easy enough to change. Here's what I've changed it to: We have received a request from someone asking us to add or delete your email address to or from the $list mailing list. If it wasn't you, or you don't want us to do this, ignore this message and you'll never hear from us again. IF YOU WANT US TO TAKE THIS ACTION, send email to $whoami and include within the body of the of the message, EXACTLY as it appears below, the following two lines: auth $cookie $cmd $list $subscriber end Be sure to REMOVE any carats (>) or other "reply" marks your email program inserts before sending, and be sure that the "auth" is on one line and "end" is on a separate line, or our mailing list program will not recognize the "auth" command. The purpose of this verification is to make sure that no one can add or remove your name to or from our lists without your approval. This keeps on-line vandals from ``mailbombing'' you with unwanted mailing list memberships. If you have any questions about the policy of the list owner, please contact "$list-approval\@$whereami". > Also is it possible > to still run confirm but get rid of the approval code? Not and still have any sort of meaningful confirmation. > We want it to be able to be approved by simply replying to the email. Please do NOT do that. I run a bunch of mailing lists and autoresponders that are frequently forged into mailing lists that use "reply to confirm", because they misinterpret bounce messages or autoreponder responses as confirmations. These days, the most reasonable way to do confirmations is to put a unique URL in the confirmation message that the recipient can click on. I believe that's in Majordomo2. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 9 04:48:46 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id EAA06162; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 04:41:45 -0800 (PST) Received: from gsp.org (rsk.tidalwave.com [208.211.3.21]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id EAA06155 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 04:41:38 -0800 (PST) Received: (from rsk@localhost) by gsp.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id HAA09493; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 07:54:17 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 07:54:12 -0500 From: Rich Kulawiec To: webmaster@remarq.com, postmaster@remarq.com, hostmaster@remarq.com Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM, Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com Subject: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq Message-ID: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Remarq: This morning I noticed that Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com has just subscribed to the whitewater mailing list which I own and manage. Upon searching your site, I see that several other mailing lists hosted at gsp.org are also listed on your site, and are presented as if they were original content created by remarq.com. There is, as far as I can, NOTHING indicating the ownership of these mailing lists, their policies, their procedures, or anything else. Hitting the "info" button DOES NOT cause the list's description, operating procedures, or anything else to appear, either. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? You wouldn't by chance be repackaging content that I and the participants in the mailing list create as your own, would you? I expect a prompt and satisfactory explanation for this behavior on your part. I'm CC'ing various forums used by mailing list managers so that they are aware of what you're doing. Any response by you may be forwarded to them as well. Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com: If you're a real person (and it's hard for me to tell from the context if you are or aren't) you're welcome to subscribe by directly interacting with the mailing list manageer here; or you can write me directly and I'll substitute your real address for the one listed above. List-managers: You might want to drop by www.remarq.com and see if your mailing lists are included there as well; use the search box on their home page. ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 9 07:33:37 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id HAA07771; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 07:20:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from ivan.iecc.com (ivan.iecc.com [208.31.42.33]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id HAA07762 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 07:20:01 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 22288 invoked by uid 100); 9 Mar 2000 10:31:47 -0500 Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 10:31:47 -0500 (EST) From: John R Levine To: Rich Kulawiec cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq In-Reply-To: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > You wouldn't by chance be repackaging content that I and the > participants in the mailing list create as your own, would you? Gee, what a surprise. > Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com: That's a real person whose login at remarq is waterdog. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 9 11:04:17 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA10568; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 10:49:28 -0800 (PST) Received: from gsp.org (rsk.tidalwave.com [208.211.3.21]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA10561 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 10:49:19 -0800 (PST) Received: (from rsk@localhost) by gsp.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA13177; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 14:02:14 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 14:02:10 -0500 From: Rich Kulawiec To: John R Levine Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq Message-ID: <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from johnl@iecc.com on Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 10:31:47AM -0500 Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 10:31:47AM -0500, John R Levine wrote: > > You wouldn't by chance be repackaging content that I and the > > participants in the mailing list create as your own, would you? > > Gee, what a surprise. I have the suspicion that there is some bit of well-known knowledge that I'm missing. Several neurons in the back of my brain insist that there was some sort of (recent?) to-do over Remarq inserting ads into Usenet articles, but those are the same neurons which caused me to leave off a SCSI terminator this morning, so they obviously can't be trusted. > > Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com: > > That's a real person whose login at remarq is waterdog. Thanks -- I figured that out after I did a bit more poking around. I found other mailing lists that I run there as well, *and* I found out that Remarq apparently 'rates' them based on who-knows-what criteria, *and* that some of them are shown as having no content, when in fact they've got traffic going through them all the time. I am not a happy camper. Any insight that you or other people can provide (or point me to so that I can educate myself) would be most helpful. ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 9 17:53:30 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id RAA01373; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 17:41:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.mc.net (mail.mc.net [209.172.128.4]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id RAA01366 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 17:41:25 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 9673 invoked from network); 10 Mar 2000 02:05:04 -0000 Received: from chi-ras-5-209-112-91-44.mc.net (HELO ?209.112.91.136?) (209.112.91.44) by mail.mc.net with SMTP; 10 Mar 2000 02:05:04 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: twentz@mail.mc.net Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 19:53:31 -0600 To: Rich Kulawiec , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Tim Wentz Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Spam-Rating: mail.mc.net 1.6.1 0/1000/N Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Hello, I'm new to the list-managers list, but I can tell you what our list went through a few weeks ago. Our list was alerted to remarq's tactics a few weeks ago when one of our subscribers found a new message board on remarq that delivered the same messages she was getting from our list. What we found was: whenever anyone subscribes to remarq's "message board" for your list, their system sends a subscribe command to your list. All of the messages are archived from the moment the first remarq subscription comes through and they maintain a subscriber list gleaned from the posts. From the moment we realized what was happening we locked down our list, changing the config files to require admin approval of subscribe requests so that we could prevent remarq from receiving any more posts. My wife sent a list of complaints to remarq's support staff and they removed the archives and our mailing list from their site within 24 - 36 hours. Once we were off remarq's site, we went back to normal operations. Tim Wentz twentz@mc.net Here's what was sent to remarq. >Your company has chosen to advertise and make available to your >subscribers the Unschooling List. While I appreciate the additional >publicity for my list, you should be aware that you are violating >several of the Unschooling Lists written policies by doing so. Please >discontinue this practice immediately by removing all archives from any >records you may have, destroying the list of names and addresses of >subscribers you have collected and removing our name from your boards. > >My list of complaints to date is as follows: > >remarq has chosen to archive our list against our written policy, and >make it available and even cross reference my list with many other >lists. We have a strong 'no archives' policy in place and have for 5 >years. This is completely and totally unacceptable. Allowing our >illegal collected archives and cross posting them to subscribers of >other lists is not only a massive invasion of privacy - but also >highly illegal as we have young children disccussing personal matters >here and you are not only allowing access by the general public but >displaying their private e-mail addresses too. > >remarq jeopardizes our privacy by making a list of all active list >members available to anyone who joins the list, including >spammers who may join for 5 minutes and then leave This violate >written policy in my Welcome Message and in my own config files. > >remarq subscribers have access to other people's private ADMIN >reminders, messages, even unsubscribed people's requests to be >subscribed! I can't privately communicate or scold one remarq >subscriber without all the others knowing. > >remarq does not allow me to communicate with a person wanting to join >our community until after they are allowed in. I, as a list >owner, need to be able to be sure all applicants are aware of our >purposeand our rules. As we have children on our list, their security >and privacy are of the utmost imporatnce to me. > >remarq s*ubscribers don't get the lists Welcome Message when they join, >so they are unaware of our posting guidellines. > >remarq s*ubscribers seem to have between 5-10% of their daily mail >bounced back to me as undeliverable (*very* poor service!) > >remarq didn't have the common courtesy to ask the list owners about our >being included in their 'service' - or to disclose their policies, >they just snatched us up Rather than being polite and letting a list >'opt-in' you are insisting that a list 'opt-out' after the damage to >privacy has already been done. > >remarq's privacy disclosure statement basically says you shouldn't >expect privacy on the internet and that it isn't their problem to >provide it. Well sirs, I assure you we had at least some privacy before >you began archiving and cross posting my list in a public forum. > > >I have required all new subscriptions to be approved, and unsubbed all >existing remarq subscribers. Of course, as they have not unsubbed from >remarq, they still have unlimited access to not only the illegally >collected UL archives, but also the illegally collected address book. > >Again, I am requesting that all posts, all records and all mention of >the Unschooling List please be immediately removed from your site and >all affiliated sites. > >I expect written confirmation of my request by the close of business >Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2000. From list-managers-owner Thu Mar 9 20:24:01 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id UAA02678; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 20:16:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.mc.net (mail.mc.net [209.172.128.4]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id UAA02671 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 20:16:09 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 2576 invoked from network); 10 Mar 2000 04:39:37 -0000 Received: from chi-ras-1-209-112-95-235.mc.net (HELO ?209.112.91.136?) (209.112.95.235) by mail.mc.net with SMTP; 10 Mar 2000 04:39:37 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: twentz@mail.mc.net Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 22:28:14 -0600 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Tim Wentz Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Spam-Rating: mail.mc.net 1.6.1 0/1000/N Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Hello, I'm new to the list-managers list, but I can tell you what our list went through a few weeks ago. Our list was alerted to remarq's tactics a few weeks ago when one of our s*bscribers found a new message board on remarq that delivered the same messages she was getting from our list. What we found was: whenever anyone s*bscribes to remarq's "message board" for your list, their system sends a s*bscribe command to your list. All of the messages are archived from the moment the first remarq s*bscription comes through and they maintain a s*bscriber list gleaned from the posts. From the moment we realized what was happening we locked down our list, changing the config files to require admin approval of s*bscribe requests so that we could prevent remarq from receiving any more posts. My wife sent a list of complaints to remarq's support staff and they removed the archives and our mailing list from their site within 24 - 36 hours. Once we were off remarq's site, we went back to normal operations. Tim Wentz twentz@mc.net Here's what was sent to remarq. >Your company has chosen to advertise and make available to your >subscribers the Unschooling List. While I appreciate the additional >publicity for my list, you should be aware that you are violating >several of the Unschooling Lists written policies by doing so. Please >discontinue this practice immediately by removing all archives from any >records you may have, destroying the list of names and addresses of >subscribers you have collected and removing our name from your boards. > >My list of complaints to date is as follows: > >remarq has chosen to archive our list against our written policy, and >make it available and even cross reference my list with many other >lists. We have a strong 'no archives' policy in place and have for 5 >years. This is completely and totally unacceptable. Allowing our >illegal collected archives and cross posting them to subscribers of >other lists is not only a massive invasion of privacy - but also >highly illegal as we have young children disccussing personal matters >here and you are not only allowing access by the general public but >displaying their private e-mail addresses too. > >remarq jeopardizes our privacy by making a list of all active list >members available to anyone who joins the list, including >spammers who may join for 5 minutes and then leave This violate >written policy in my Welcome Message and in my own config files. > >remarq subscribers have access to other people's private ADMIN >reminders, messages, even unsubscribed people's requests to be >subscribed! I can't privately communicate or scold one remarq >subscriber without all the others knowing. > >remarq does not allow me to communicate with a person wanting to join >our community until after they are allowed in. I, as a list >owner, need to be able to be sure all applicants are aware of our >purposeand our rules. As we have children on our list, their security >and privacy are of the utmost imporatnce to me. > >remarq s*ubscribers don't get the lists Welcome Message when they join, >so they are unaware of our posting guidellines. > >remarq s*ubscribers seem to have between 5-10% of their daily mail >bounced back to me as undeliverable (*very* poor service!) > >remarq didn't have the common courtesy to ask the list owners about our >being included in their 'service' - or to disclose their policies, >they just snatched us up Rather than being polite and letting a list >'opt-in' you are insisting that a list 'opt-out' after the damage to >privacy has already been done. > >remarq's privacy disclosure statement basically says you shouldn't >expect privacy on the internet and that it isn't their problem to >provide it. Well sirs, I assure you we had at least some privacy before >you began archiving and cross posting my list in a public forum. > > >I have required all new subscriptions to be approved, and unsubbed all >existing remarq subscribers. Of course, as they have not unsubbed from >remarq, they still have unlimited access to not only the illegally >collected UL archives, but also the illegally collected address book. > >Again, I am requesting that all posts, all records and all mention of >the Unschooling List please be immediately removed from your site and >all affiliated sites. > >I expect written confirmation of my request by the close of business >Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2000. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Wentz Since athletes are tested for steroids, should twentz@mc.net quiz show contestants be tested for Ginko Biloba? From list-managers-owner Fri Mar 10 10:51:03 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA13767; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 10:47:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from claude.akamai.com (walrus.ne.mediaone.net [24.147.22.188]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA13760 for ; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 10:47:38 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dshaw@localhost) by claude.akamai.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id NAA03298 for list-managers@GreatCircle.COM; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 13:59:33 -0500 Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 13:59:32 -0500 From: David Shaw To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq Message-ID: <20000310135932.L5781@akamai.com> Mail-Followup-To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii User-Agent: Mutt/1.1.2i In-Reply-To: ; from twentz@mc.net on Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 07:53:31PM -0600 X-PGP-Fingerprint: 3CB3B415/2048/4D 96 83 18 2B AF BE 45 D0 07 C4 07 51 37 B3 18 X-URL: http://www.jabberwocky.com/ X-Phase-Of-Moon: The Moon is Waxing Crescent (10% of Full) X-Pointless-Random-Number: 145 X-Silly-Header: It sure is. Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 07:53:31PM -0600, Tim Wentz wrote: > Hello, > > I'm new to the list-managers list, but I can tell you what our list > went through a few weeks ago. > > Our list was alerted to remarq's tactics a few weeks ago when one of > our subscribers found a new message board on remarq that delivered > the same messages she was getting from our list. > > What we found was: whenever anyone subscribes to remarq's "message > board" for your list, their system sends a subscribe command to your > list. All of the messages are archived from the moment the first > remarq subscription comes through and they maintain a subscriber list > gleaned from the posts. > > From the moment we realized what was happening we locked down our > list, changing the config files to require admin approval of > subscribe requests so that we could prevent remarq from receiving any > more posts. I found a better solution - I stuck them into sendmail's access.db as "550 Remarq is never welcome here". Along with listtool.com.. Such wonderful companies just itching to make a buck off of someone elses work... David -- David Shaw | dshaw@jabberwocky.com | WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/ +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson From list-managers-owner Fri Mar 10 12:17:58 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA15329; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 11:49:38 -0800 (PST) Received: (mcb@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) id LAA15319 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 11:49:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from bp.ucs.usl.edu (bp.ucs.usl.edu [130.70.40.36]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA11166 for ; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 11:34:20 -0800 (PST) Received: from louisiana.edu (ish.usl.edu [130.70.53.59]) by bp.ucs.usl.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1/ucs-server_1.3) with ESMTP id NAA13731; Thu, 9 Mar 2000 13:42:45 -0600 (CST) Message-ID: <38C7FF1B.40E1DFFB@louisiana.edu> Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 13:44:27 -0600 From: Istvan Berkeley Organization: Philosophy, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Rich Kulawiec , list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Hi there, It does appear that RemarQ is picking up mailing list traffic and archiving it. In the case of my list (PHILOSOP) at least, they are doing this without any authorization. I talked to the people who know about such things here (our person registered from the purposes of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Apparently, the appropriate response is to send a registered letter to their agent for service of process. This is, Vincent Chow RemarQ Communities, Inc. 55 South Market Street Suite 1080, San Jose, CA 95113 (see http://www.remarq.com/corporate/contact_us.html). In my letter I politely requested that the cease and desist from their apparent unapproved archiving activities and notify me of their compliance, before the end of the month. Apparently, a registered letter is better than an e-mail as one can get proof of delivery. It is also interesting to note that many of the subscription requests that come from these guys fail to specify an e-mail that is usable. That is to say, my list 'welcome' messages often bounce. As a consequence, I nuke the subscriptions. Does anyone know what the deal is with these guys? Do they claim that their carry unauthorised list content is somehow sanctioned under Section 107 (fair use)? All the best, Istvan PHILOSOP Moderator -- Istvan S. N. Berkeley, Ph.D. Philosophy & Cognitive Science E-mail: istvan@usl.edu The University of Louisiana at Lafayette [Formerly, The University of Southwestern Louisiana] P.O. Box 43770 Tel: +1 318 482-6807 Lafayette, LA 70504-3770 Fax: +1 318 482-6195 USA http://www.ucs.usl.edu/~isb9112 From list-managers-owner Sat Mar 11 02:08:45 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id BAA24264; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 01:55:20 -0800 (PST) Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.12.23]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id BAA24255 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 01:55:10 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 23194 invoked by uid 50); 11 Mar 2000 10:07:19 -0000 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> <20000309140210.A13152@gsp.org> In-Reply-To: Rich Kulawiec's message of "Thu, 9 Mar 2000 14:02:10 -0500" From: Russ Allbery Organization: The Eyrie Date: 11 Mar 2000 02:07:17 -0800 Message-ID: Lines: 38 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) XEmacs/21.1 (Biscayne) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Rich Kulawiec writes: > I have the suspicion that there is some bit of well-known knowledge that > I'm missing. Several neurons in the back of my brain insist that there > was some sort of (recent?) to-do over Remarq inserting ads into Usenet > articles, As part of an "innovative marketing program," remarQ was adding hyperlinks to words in the middle of articles as presented on their web view of Usenet, allowing advertisers to buy particular words and turning those words into hyperlinks to the advertiser's site. It apparently went quite a while without being noticed, and then was noticed by several people and started a number of discussions in various places. Lots of people were quite irate over advertising practices that implied that they, the authors of the posts, were endorsing those products. After a general outcry, remarQ backed down and purged the links from their web Usenet archives. I've had some other unrelated previous experience with the web Usenet folks (not their news outsourcing division, which is apparently largely separate and seems to have more of a clue). They attempted to sell Stanford a "Stanford-branded" presentation of Usenet, including in the sales pitch as evidence of what a good job they were doing the list of Stanford-related newsgroups they were carrying. Which included the public "ghosts" of a large number of newsgroups that we no longer distribute publically and that outside of Stanford contain only spam. They were quite surprised and shocked when I told them that I considered a "Stanford-branded" view of Usenet to be unethical and false claim that the content was provided by Stanford and a possible legal liability problem to boot. This seems to fall into the general category of "why bother to create our own content when we can just steal it from other people and sell it?". -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) From list-managers-owner Sat Mar 11 06:37:23 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id GAA00242; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 06:32:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from gsp.org (rsk.tidalwave.com [208.211.3.21]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id GAA00235 for ; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 06:32:01 -0800 (PST) Received: (from rsk@localhost) by gsp.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id JAA09982; Sat, 11 Mar 2000 09:45:21 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 09:45:19 -0500 From: Rich Kulawiec To: Eric Leach Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: your mail lists on RemarQ Message-ID: <20000311094518.A9878@gsp.org> References: <38C7E3ED.8B87CC1A@remarq.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <38C7E3ED.8B87CC1A@remarq.com>; from eleach@remarq.com on Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 09:48:30AM -0800 Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 09:48:30AM -0800, Eric Leach wrote: > Rich, > You have expressed concern about the handling of email lists on RemarQ. That's putting it mildly. I'm furious with you. > We would like to assure you that at no time has the control of any list > left the hands of that list’s owner. By categorizing your list by title > and subject in our directory, users can discover the presence of your > list and request membership from you. We merely give them a vehicle to > view their messages in our threaded discussion interface, once you have > subscribed them to the list. This is an alternative to viewing messages > solely in the user's email box with an email client, but functions > exactly the same: This is not an acceptable response. Your arrogance is astounding, even to me, and I've seen a *lot* of arrogance in my time online. Your actions violate the policies of the lists hosted here, as well as the compilation copyright which I hold on each. You are directed to take the following actions immediately: 1. You will remove all references to mailing lists hosted at gsp.org. This includes subscription information, any and all archives of the contents of those mailing lists, and any automated scripts or programs involved in collecting any kind of data from gsp.org. 2. You will ensure that at no time in the future will any mailing list or other resource hosted at gsp.org be listed at remarq.com without my express written consent. (I am the owner of this domain; check the Internic registration records.) 3. You will notify any of your users who have accessed content from gsp.org via remarq.com, that content from gsp.org has been removed from your site because you were presenting it without authorization from gsp.org and in violation of the policies of gsp.org. You are advised, but not directed to take the following actions: 4. Get a clue. You've already been hammered by the community for inserting ad links in Usenet articles, and you're about to get hammered again (you don't think I'm going to keep this to myself, do you?) for usurping the rights of mailing list owners. You can either continue to generate ill will toward your site and your business by taking things that don't belong to you without permission, or you can choose to ASK FIRST, at which point perhaps you will find people like me may be a bit more cooperative. Or not. But that's *our* choice, not yours, and you are required to respect it. Alternatively, if you persist in the course of action you have apparently set for yourselves, you will alienate increasing portions of the Internet community. ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 01:18:21 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id AAA23167; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 00:53:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from ma-1.rootsweb.com (ma-1.rootsweb.com [209.192.148.153]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id AAA23160 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 00:53:40 -0800 (PST) Received: (from twp@localhost) by ma-1.rootsweb.com (8.10.0.Beta10/8.10.0.Beta10) id e2D95wQ23576 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 04:05:58 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 04:05:58 -0500 From: Tim Pierce To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: VERPs versus batched delivery Message-ID: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.7us Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk John Levine commented recently about the common perception that VERP-style delivery is a bad thing. I have been dealing with this perception here as well: I would desperately like to implement VERP in SmartList, but the managers here are concerned about the effects on our bandwidth. However, none of us have any hard numbers to back up our positions, so I did a little research tonight. Unfortunately, the numbers I got appear to suggest that switching to VERP deliveries would increase our bandwidth consumption by as much as 40%. Here's how I arrived at that number, for anyone who wants to follow along and correct my assumptions. ------------------------------ I chose a thousand lists at random from one of our list servers. (A more realistic study would have taken the volume of list traffic into account. That would actually increase the bandwidth consumption even more, so my numbers may be considered conservative.) For each of those lists, I counted the total number of addresses subscribed to the list, and the number of unique domains that those addresses represent. Because VERP delivery requires delivering a separate message body for each recipient, the total number of addresses should be just about the number of times we transmit a message body over the network. Batched delivery permits us to deliver a message body just about once for each unique domain on the list, so I counted the number of unique domains as approximately the number of times we deliver a message body using traditional batch methods. That gives me a way to estimate the bandwidth increase for any given list: take the difference between the number of VERP deliveries and the number of batch deliveries, and divide by the number of batch deliveries to find the percentage by which that number would increase. So I calculated this percentage for each of the thousand lists, then added them all together and took the average percentage. The result was an average volume increase of 40%. ------------------------------ I dream about the benefits that we could get from VERP delivery -- reduced CPU utilization, increased server efficiency, less listowner confusion, better word-of-mouth, and so on -- but a 40% bandwidth increase means buying another T1 or more just to cover the extra deliveries. That's a pretty hard sell no matter what the bennies are. I'm interested in hearing from people who have migrated from a sendmail-based mailing list platform to qmail, Postfix or some other VERP-style delivery system, and have measured the bandwidth deltas. Did you in fact find a significant increase in volume, and if so, how did you handle it? (I am also interested in hearing from people who can poke holes in my statistical methods, of course.) -- Regards, Tim Pierce RootsWeb.com lead system admonsterator and Chief Hacking Officer From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 03:22:19 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id DAA27199; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 03:15:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.12.23]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id DAA27189 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 03:15:14 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 1641 invoked by uid 50); 13 Mar 2000 11:27:42 -0000 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery References: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> In-Reply-To: Tim Pierce's message of "Mon, 13 Mar 2000 04:05:58 -0500" From: Russ Allbery Organization: The Eyrie Date: 13 Mar 2000 03:27:42 -0800 Message-ID: Lines: 34 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) XEmacs/21.1 (Biscayne) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Tim Pierce writes: > Because VERP delivery requires delivering a separate message body for > each recipient, the total number of addresses should be just about the > number of times we transmit a message body over the network. Batched > delivery permits us to deliver a message body just about once for each > unique domain on the list, so I counted the number of unique domains as > approximately the number of times we deliver a message body using > traditional batch methods. That's ideal batch delivery. I'd be curious how close to ideal batch delivery you actually arrive in practice. For one thing, you often won't be able to deliver more than 100 messages for a particular domain at a time using most standard MTAs since they limit the RCPT count at that level, and many sites set an even lower limit for spam-control reasons. If your estimation counted 1,000 AOL addresses as a single delivery, for example, that may actually be 10 deliveries or more. Do you have any way of measuring the effective batching rather than the theoretical maximum batching? > So I calculated this percentage for each of the thousand lists, then > added them all together and took the average percentage. The result was > an average volume increase of 40%. This number is going to vary somewhat based on your average message size, since there's a degree of fixed outgoing bandwidth to do the SMTP negotiation. VERP will increase that somewhat too (longer return path), but not by 40%. If you send a lot of short messages, this may be significant (although it's definitely a lesser factor than the above-mentioned deviations from ideal batch delivery). -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 04:39:51 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id EAA28098; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 04:27:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.rev.net (mail.rev.net [206.67.68.8]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id EAA28091 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 04:27:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from fantasy (USER107.GVA.NET [216.80.135.111]) by mail.rev.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e2DCaRv08450 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 07:36:27 -0500 From: "Bernie Cosell" Organization: Fantasy Farm Fibers To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 07:39:45 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Message-ID: <38CC9B41.5272.3CE2056@localhost> In-reply-to: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On 13 Mar 2000, at 4:05, Tim Pierce wrote: Pardon the dumb question [I don't even know what the acronym 'VERP' stands for, although I understood what you were talking about so perhaps it didn't matter]: > Because VERP delivery requires delivering a separate message body > for each recipient, ... [...] > So I calculated this percentage for each of the thousand lists, then > added them all together and took the average percentage. The result > was an average volume increase of 40%. > I dream about the benefits that we could get from VERP delivery -- > reduced CPU utilization, increased server efficiency, less listowner > confusion, better word-of-mouth, and so on .... The last two are OK, but I'm not convinced about the first two: in 'normal' delivery, there's just *one* copy of the message and it gets routed all over hell and gone... is the CPU to make and manage all those extra copies trivial? even if trivial, how does it end up being _reduced_ utilization. And doesn't there have to be CPU activity and server activity behind handling those extra 40% of messages? And -one- down server will now not result in _one_ message in your queue, but bunches (implies more overhead/load). And similarly for 'server efficiency' --- how does making 600 SMTP connetions to mail.aol.com instead of one result in 'efficiency' -- all of the protocol, ident, lookups, etc, all have to be done iteratively and for each copy, instead of just once. That is, it strikes me as the difference, in usenet terms, between multiple-newsgroup-posting and crossposting, and few folks have good 'efficiency' things about multiple-posts. So unless I'm really misunderstanding what VERP is [which is possible, since I'm kind-of guessing], it would be better for the -users-, it isn't clear right off that it'll be a win for the _server_ (even beyond the extra net bandwidth eaten by the extra copies). /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <-- From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 06:53:11 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id GAA29177; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 06:41:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.12.23]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id GAA29170 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 06:41:31 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 5982 invoked by uid 50); 13 Mar 2000 14:54:02 -0000 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery References: <38CC9B41.5272.3CE2056@localhost> In-Reply-To: "Bernie Cosell"'s message of "Mon, 13 Mar 2000 07:39:45 -0500" From: Russ Allbery Organization: The Eyrie Date: 13 Mar 2000 06:54:02 -0800 Message-ID: Lines: 46 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) XEmacs/21.1 (Biscayne) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Bernie Cosell writes: > The last two are OK, but I'm not convinced about the first two: in > 'normal' delivery, there's just *one* copy of the message and it gets > routed all over hell and gone... is the CPU to make and manage all those > extra copies trivial? Basically, yes. :) Compared to the amount of CPU that it takes to analyze bounces, figure out what address bounced, etc. it's pretty trivial. And that analysis doesn't even always work. > even if trivial, how does it end up being _reduced_ utilization. Because your bounce handling suddenly becomes trivial, and as a result your mailing lists get cleaned of bad addresses *much* faster and more thoroughly than any process that requires human invention (as bounce handling without VERP does with depressing frequency). > And doesn't there have to be CPU activity and server activity behind > handling those extra 40% of messages? And -one- down server will now > not result in _one_ message in your queue, but bunches (implies more > overhead/load). On the other hand, those can be scheduled and retried with more flexibility, which may even out your load (good in general). This could go either way. > And similarly for 'server efficiency' --- how does making 600 SMTP > connetions to mail.aol.com instead of one result in 'efficiency' VERP doesn't have to be implemented that way; you can open a single connection and send all the messages in serial. You can even use pipelining if the remote server supports it, which would regain part of the message transmission delay. > That is, it strikes me as the difference, in usenet terms, between > multiple-newsgroup-posting and crossposting, Well, if the SMTP protocol supported return paths that varied by recipient, one wouldn't have to do it that way. The difference between this and Usenet multiposting is that one actually gains a very significant feature from varying return paths, whereas there's really nothing gained from Usenet multiposting. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 08:52:19 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id IAA00544; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 08:46:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from ma-1.rootsweb.com (ma-1.rootsweb.com [209.192.148.153]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id IAA00537 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 08:46:51 -0800 (PST) Received: (from twp@localhost) by ma-1.rootsweb.com (8.10.0.Beta10/8.10.0.Beta10) id e2DGxK526246; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 11:59:20 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 11:59:20 -0500 From: Tim Pierce To: Russ Allbery Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Message-ID: <20000313115920.K14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> References: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.7us In-Reply-To: Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 03:27:42AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Tim Pierce writes: > > > ... I counted the number of unique domains as > > approximately the number of times we deliver a message body using > > traditional batch methods. > > That's ideal batch delivery. I'd be curious how close to ideal batch > delivery you actually arrive in practice. For one thing, you often won't > be able to deliver more than 100 messages for a particular domain at a > time using most standard MTAs since they limit the RCPT count at that > level, and many sites set an even lower limit for spam-control reasons. > If your estimation counted 1,000 AOL addresses as a single delivery, for > example, that may actually be 10 deliveries or more. > > Do you have any way of measuring the effective batching rather than the > theoretical maximum batching? You raise an excellent point. We don't keep logs of outgoing mail delivery, for obvious reasons, so there's not much to go on. I could look at our mail queues and sort of make educated guesses. I may try turning on outbound mail logging for an hour at a time, if I can be sure our disk won't melt down, in order to get a better picture of our delivery performance -- Regards, Tim Pierce RootsWeb.com lead system admonsterator and Chief Hacking Officer From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 10:07:21 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA01428; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 10:04:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from ns.secondary.com (ns.secondary.com [208.184.76.39]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA01421 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 10:04:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from laptop.imc.org (ip12.proper.com [165.227.249.12]) by ns.secondary.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA18596; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 10:15:37 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <4.3.2.20000313101458.00b3f270@mail.imc.org> X-Sender: phoffman@mail.imc.org X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3 Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 10:16:56 -0800 To: Tim Pierce , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Paul Hoffman / IMC Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery In-Reply-To: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk A thought sparked by a very different discussion about a very different protocol: What if the list software did VERPs on one out every hundred messages, or maybe on only one message a day? Would you then get the list-cleaning advantages without the costs of doing it on every message? --Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 11:22:51 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA02345; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 11:17:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from Kitten.mcs.net (Kitten.mcs.com [192.160.127.90]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA02338 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 11:17:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from Mercury.mcs.net (root@Mercury.mcs.net [192.160.127.80]) by Kitten.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA31969 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:30:26 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dattier@mcs.net) Received: (from dattier@localhost) by Mercury.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.8.2) id NAA18763 for list-managers@GreatCircle.COM; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:30:26 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <200003131930.NAA18763@Mercury.mcs.net> Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:30:26 -0600 (CST) From: "David W. Tamkin" To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-Reply-To: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> from "Tim Pierce" at Mar 13, 2000 04:05:58 AM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Warning: The true sender is dattier@Mercury.mcs.net. Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Tim Pierce wrote, | I dream about the benefits that we could get from VERP delivery -- | reduced CPU utilization, increased server efficiency, less listowner | confusion, better word-of-mouth, and so on ... OK, I'll agree about less listowner confusion, and Russ Allbery has already explained the reduced CPU utilization and the increased server efficiency in his response when Bernie Cosell asked, but how do VERPs improve the word-of- mouth? If anything, I've seen that as a small downside to VERPs: unsophisticated members see their own addresses in the return path and panic that they're being forged. Or sometimes the headers will be corrupted above the RFC822 From: line, so the list member's MUA will see the From: line as part of the body, ignore it, and try to construct a sender name from the return path, which will include the recipient's address in the VERP portion, placing it where even a brand newbie who doesn't know about displaying full headers will see it; the reaction then is something to witness. (And of course, if it happens on an unmoderated list, everyone argues "My address was on it!" "No, you're wrong, mine was!") One public listhost that uses a modification of ezmlm has tried to reduce the panic factor by using the word "sentto" earlier in the VERP instead of "errors" as it used to or "return" as some others do. [Another workaround is to assign a member ID to each subscription and to use that in the VERP instead of the subscriber's actual address.] While that's not enough to outweigh the advantages of VERPs, it certainly does make me wonder why Tim says they improve the word-of-mouth. Oh, speaking of VERPs, a couple months after my drawing the problem to their attention, BigMailBox modified its webmail to allow equal signs in outgoing addresses. Since sites that run it actually direct users to BMB's machines rather than running copies of the software, the fix took care of all BMB sites. Before then, as I was saying on this list last fall, users of BMB sites could not send confirmations to addresses that included equal signs, and BMB sites could not send NDNs to VERP addresses because of the equal signs in them. From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 12:52:36 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id MAA03227; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 12:43:48 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.thesquare.com ([160.79.93.10]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id MAA03220 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 12:43:43 -0800 (PST) Received: from [192.168.0.169] [192.168.1.2] by mail.thesquare.com with ESMTP (SMTPD32-5.05) id A6F24F5A00BA; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:00:34 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: <38CC9B41.5272.3CE2056@localhost> X-Organization: Little to None X-Mailer: Eudora 5.0 for Cray T3E-1200 Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 15:56:11 -0500 To: List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Vince Sabio Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk ** Sometime around 06:54 -0800 03/13/00, Russ Allbery said: >Bernie Cosell writes: > > > The last two are OK, but I'm not convinced about the first two: in > > 'normal' delivery, there's just *one* copy of the message and it gets > > routed all over hell and gone... is the CPU to make and manage all those > > extra copies trivial? > >Basically, yes. :) Compared to the amount of CPU that it takes to >analyze bounces, figure out what address bounced, etc. it's pretty >trivial. And that analysis doesn't even always work. > > > even if trivial, how does it end up being _reduced_ utilization. > >Because your bounce handling suddenly becomes trivial, and as a result >your mailing lists get cleaned of bad addresses *much* faster and more >thoroughly than any process that requires human invention (as bounce >handling without VERP does with depressing frequency). SmartBounce has better than 97% bounce recognition without using VERP (though it optionally supports VERP as well), so the human intervention is pretty minimal -- and in many of those cases, there's nothing for even a human to go on. However, like all automated processes, it _does_ require a certain amount of CPU and I/O ("The Killer"(tm)) for processing. __________________________________________________________________________ Vince Sabio Got Bounces? vince@vjs.org Got Jokes? Got Spam? From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 13:08:03 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id MAA03479; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 12:58:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from CU.NIH.GOV (cu.nih.gov [128.231.160.111]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id MAA03472 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 12:58:54 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <200003132058.MAA03472@honor.greatcircle.com> To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: "Roger Fajman" Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:05:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > What if the list software did VERPs on one out every hundred messages, or > maybe on only one message a day? Would you then get the list-cleaning > advantages without the costs of doing it on every message? That's the way that LISTSERV does it. It works well. The percentage of VERPs can be specified by the list owner. LISTSERV also limits the VERPs (it calls them probes) to one post be day, rather than doing them on every post. From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 13:43:16 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA03923; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:32:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from waltz.rahul.net (waltz.rahul.net [192.160.13.9]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id NAA03916 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:32:10 -0800 (PST) Received: by waltz.rahul.net (Postfix, from userid 511) id 1AFC199E51; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:44:40 -0800 (PST) To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery In-reply-to: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:44:39 -0800 From: Michelle Dick Message-Id: <20000313214440.1AFC199E51@waltz.rahul.net> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Tim wrote: > I dream about the benefits that we could get from VERP delivery -- > reduced CPU utilization, increased server efficiency, less listowner > confusion, better word-of-mouth, and so on -- but a 40% bandwidth > increase means buying another T1 or more just to cover the extra > deliveries. That's a pretty hard sell no matter what the bennies > are. I agree. I like the VERP solution too. However, I'm in even a worse situation than you: the small scale situation. My lists run over a modem line and are sent to a smarthost that can handle large numbers of addressees at a time (though I believe I limit it to 500) -- every addressee gets sent to the same host. So, the bandwidth increase I'd see would be over several hundred thousand percent increase. I'm in a non-DSL-able location, and other solutions are not cost effective at this time. My bounce handler works over 90% of the time (and it's been over a year since I've had one it missed that I couldn't figure out on my own in less than a minute), so not changing is a no-brainer. CPU capacity is cheap, cheap, cheap compared to bandwidth in my situation. The $500 computer I bought last year for my own use is twice as powerful as the one that runs the list with load to spare. -- Michelle Dick artemis@rahul.net East Palo Alto, CA From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 14:13:08 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA04610; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:39:47 -0800 (PST) Received: (mcb@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) id NAA04600 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:39:45 -0800 (PST) Received: from fb01.eng00.mindspring.net (fb01.eng00.mindspring.net [207.69.229.19]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id RAA18967 for ; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 17:41:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from KKorganTP600E.wetheliving.com (user-2ive2vc.dialup.mindspring.com [165.247.11.236]) by fb01.eng00.mindspring.net (8.9.3/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA06931 for ; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 20:53:05 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <4.3.2.20000310204239.00a78480@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu> X-Sender: kjk6@postoffice.mail.cornell.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3 Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 20:52:44 -0500 To: list-managers@greatcircle.com From: Kirez Korgan Subject: moderating a list with a cgi form Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Greetings, I'm hoping to use a form & formmail.pl to moderate one of my lists from a web site. This will enable me to allow a team of several people to stop at the web site and moderate the list whenever they have time --- viewing emails that are in the queue, then copy&pasting them into a form, and submitting them directly to the list, with the headers appropriately doctored for a moderated Majordomo 1.94 list. I'm wondering if anyone knows whether the form can be manipulated so that it will submit a clean, properly formatted email. The body of the email needs to begin with the headers, as follows: approved: PASSWORD to: objectivism@wetheliving.com from: Arthur D'Poste Subject: I love my email list community Blah blah blah blah blah. ******************************************************** ...So the challenge is to get the form properly formatted. I've got the system set up to allow this moderation at http://wetheliving.com/owlmod -- I use MHonArc to archive my lists. The posts that are submitted to the list appear in the 'queue' in the top left frame, the form for submitting the posts is below it in the bottom left frame, and the 'output' to the moderated list appears in the right half frame. The frames can be resized to make it easier to deal with. Can a form submission have such a tailored format.... dispensing with the usual "The results of a form submission are as follows..." etc? Anyone with an answer or solution to this? cheers, Kirez From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 14:27:58 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA04564; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:39:17 -0800 (PST) Received: (mcb@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) id NAA04552 for list-managers@greatcircle.com; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:39:13 -0800 (PST) Received: from claude.akamai.com (walrus.ne.mediaone.net [24.147.22.188]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id KAA13842 for ; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 10:54:25 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dshaw@localhost) by claude.akamai.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) id OAA03384; Fri, 10 Mar 2000 14:05:04 -0500 Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 14:05:04 -0500 From: David Shaw To: Rich Kulawiec Cc: webmaster@remarq.com, postmaster@remarq.com, hostmaster@remarq.com, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM, Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com Subject: Re: Unauthorized archiving and presentation of mailing list by remarq Message-ID: <20000310140504.M5781@akamai.com> Mail-Followup-To: Rich Kulawiec , webmaster@remarq.com, postmaster@remarq.com, hostmaster@remarq.com, list-managers@GreatCircle.COM, Q_1003865_waterdog@lists.remarq.com References: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii User-Agent: Mutt/1.1.2i In-Reply-To: <20000309075412.A9102@gsp.org>; from rsk@gsp.org on Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 07:54:12AM -0500 X-PGP-Fingerprint: 3CB3B415/2048/4D 96 83 18 2B AF BE 45 D0 07 C4 07 51 37 B3 18 X-URL: http://www.jabberwocky.com/ X-Phase-Of-Moon: The Moon is Waxing Crescent (10% of Full) X-Pointless-Random-Number: 180 X-Silly-Header: It sure is. Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 07:54:12AM -0500, Rich Kulawiec wrote: > List-managers: > > You might want to drop by www.remarq.com and see if your mailing lists > are included there as well; use the search box on their home page. Hell, I've had dozens of Remarq-ified users try and subscribe to one of my lists over the past few weeks. Inevitably, the addresses would all bounce with obscure NNTP (yes, NNTP (Usenet)!) errors after a day or so. At any point I would have more Remarq users in the "bounce" file than in the actual list file. I figured they were just hopelessly incompetent, and I could ignore them. Now that I see they are capturing addresses off of a private list, they become The Enemy, and I've blackholed their entire site. Life is too short to waste time negotiating with losers like them. David -- David Shaw | dshaw@jabberwocky.com | WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/ +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 14:43:52 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id OAA05422; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 14:25:50 -0800 (PST) Received: from public.lists.apple.com (public.lists.apple.com [17.254.0.151]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id OAA05415 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 14:25:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from [17.216.27.198] (A17-216-27-198.apple.com [17.216.27.198]) by public.lists.apple.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id OAA09724 ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 14:36:53 -0800 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200003132058.MAA03472@honor.greatcircle.com> References: <200003132058.MAA03472@honor.greatcircle.com> Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 14:38:05 -0800 To: "Roger Fajman" , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 4:05 PM -0500 3/13/2000, Roger Fajman wrote: > > What if the list software did VERPs on one out every hundred messages, or >> maybe on only one message a day? Would you then get the list-cleaning >> advantages without the costs of doing it on every message? > >That's the way that LISTSERV does it. It works well. The percentage of >VERPs can be specified by the list owner. This ignores some of the other advantages of VERPing -- for instance, you can start customizing messages to make things better for the users. For instance, putting the user's address back in the To: line, encoding unsubscribe info into your unsubscribe links, that sort of thing. it can REALLY cut the % of user problems and raise user satisfaction a lot. And really cut the admin hassles as well.... VERPing technology can buy you lots beyond simply making bounces easier, if you want. -- -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'" From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 15:39:04 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id PAA06248; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 15:26:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from scifi.squawk.com (glock.squawk.com [208.176.124.157]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id PAA06241 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 15:26:25 -0800 (PST) Received: from tpad.squawk.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by scifi.squawk.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 57CC7350C2; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:38:57 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.20000313181559.039f4360@127.0.0.1> X-Sender: njs@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:15:59 -0500 To: Paul Hoffman / IMC From: Nick Simicich Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Cc: Tim Pierce , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.20000313101458.00b3f270@mail.imc.org> References: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 10:16 AM 3/13/00 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote: >A thought sparked by a very different discussion about a very different >protocol: > >What if the list software did VERPs on one out every hundred messages, or >maybe on only one message a day? Would you then get the list-cleaning >advantages without the costs of doing it on every message? I solved this problem in a vey simple way. The bounce software sets a flag when it gets a bounce it can't fend. The delivery software then verps and resets the flag. No unparsable bounces, no verps. An unparsable bounce? One verp. -- That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. That which does kill us makes us smell stronger, after a few days, anyway. Nick Simicich mailto:njs@scifi.squawk.com http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World! From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 16:22:34 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA06803; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:16:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from transport.mail-list.com (transport.mail-list.com [206.109.113.140]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA06796 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:15:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from ([206.109.113.127]) [206.109.113.127] by transport.mail-list.com with esmtp (Exim 2.11 #1) id 12Uf9U-0000X2-00; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 00:25:36 +0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-Id: Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:25:44 -0600 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: mark david mcCreary Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk >Unfortunately, the numbers I got appear to suggest that switching >to VERP deliveries would increase our bandwidth consumption by as >much as 40%. Here's how I arrived at that number, for anyone who >wants to follow along and correct my assumptions. > Tim I would think that your labor costs savings would be able to offset any increase in bandwidth costs when using VERP. That is, we have a part-time person to help subscribers that are having problems, and the vast majority of those problems are people having trouble getting unsubscribed. If we were not using VERP single delivery, that would most likely be a full time job. That's because with the traditional BCC method, the subscriber never sees any clue as to which email address they are subscribed under. We put in the subscribers email address in the To: line of all announcement lists whenever we are doing VERP. I have seen other lists drop in the email address at the bottom of messages too, and both might be advisable. As long as you are sending a unique message anyway, why not ? We use Exim as our MTA, which has the ability to do VERP, as well as manipulate headers so that we can put the receipents email address in the To: line. We use VERP on all our small and or in-frequent lists. For our bigger lists, we use the traditional mailing list method for all the large domains, and VERP single delivery for the rest of the list. With AOL for example, I don't think VERP helps that much, since AOL handles bounces ok, and the email ends up in the mailbox for the "screen name" that the person is using, so they are rarely confused as to which address of theirs is on our list. And with the rapidly falling price of bandwidth, I expect we will be using VERP single delivery on every single piece of email. Both for the easy handling of bounces, and eliminating the confusion of which email address is on the list,from the subscribers point of view. That's my 2 cents :-) mark mail-list.com franchise toolsmiths, language lawyers, and quality assurance people needed http://www.mail-list.com/franchise From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 16:42:42 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA06907; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:25:06 -0800 (PST) Received: from ma-1.rootsweb.com (ma-1.rootsweb.com [209.192.148.153]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA06895 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:24:57 -0800 (PST) Received: (from twp@localhost) by ma-1.rootsweb.com (8.10.0.Beta10/8.10.0.Beta10) id e2E0at930626; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 19:36:55 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 19:36:54 -0500 From: Tim Pierce To: "David W. Tamkin" Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Message-ID: <20000313193654.U14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> References: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> <200003131930.NAA18763@Mercury.mcs.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.7us In-Reply-To: <200003131930.NAA18763@Mercury.mcs.net> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 01:30:26PM -0600, David W. Tamkin wrote: > Tim Pierce wrote, > > | I dream about the benefits that we could get from VERP delivery -- > | reduced CPU utilization, increased server efficiency, less listowner > | confusion, better word-of-mouth, and so on ... > > OK, I'll agree about less listowner confusion, and Russ Allbery has already > explained the reduced CPU utilization and the increased server efficiency in > his response when Bernie Cosell asked, but how do VERPs improve the word-of- > mouth? I would expect VERP-based delivery to be a big draw to potential list administrators. List managers are always exchanging gossip about which sites make it easiest to run a mailing list, and handling bounces are the biggest headache by far that the typical list admin has to deal with. Eliminating that hassle would be a feather in our cap for other list managers. -- Regards, Tim Pierce RootsWeb.com lead system admonsterator and Chief Hacking Officer From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 16:57:16 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id QAA07105; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:42:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from prserv.net (out4.prserv.net [32.97.166.34]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id QAA07090 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 16:42:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from milton ([32.100.71.228]) by prserv.net (out4) with SMTP id <2000031400545023901t16i5e>; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 00:54:52 +0000 Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.20000313182851.009bd570@mail.iecc.com> X-Sender: johnl@mail.iecc.com (Unverified) X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.0.58 Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 19:19:33 -0500 To: "Bernie Cosell" , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: John Levine Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery In-Reply-To: <38CC9B41.5272.3CE2056@localhost> References: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk >The last two are OK, but I'm not convinced about the first two: in >'normal' delivery, there's just *one* copy of the message and it gets >routed all over hell and gone... is the CPU to make and manage all those >extra copies trivial? even if trivial, how does it end up being >_reduced_ utilization. Pragmatically, qmail does single deliveries with VERP, and it's a lot faster than sendmail. I don't know how much is the simpler design due to single deliveries, and how much is not having decades of historical cruft glommed into one giant program, but it hardly matters in practice. | That is, it strikes me as the difference, in usenet terms, between >multiple-newsgroup-posting and crossposting, Not really. The crucial difference is that it's useful to customize e-mail to individual recipients. VERP puts a custom envelope return address on each recipient's message, which permits almost completely automated bounce handling. This does work, I've used it for ages on lists I run, and it avoids vast amounts of manual effort on the part of the list admin. Once you send separate copies per recipient, you can also usefully customize the message body. In the tag at the bottoms of the message, you can put the address to which it was sent, useful to track down bounces from systems that bounce back messages while removing all trace of the original envelope. You can also add "To unsubscribe, send a message to " (substituting the actual address for user and domain.com) so that users, even whose addresses have changed since they subscribed, can easily get off the list. Dan Bernstein has pointed out in his usual annoying but accurate way that SMTP wasn't designed to be particularly efficient in bandwidth usage, and if that's what you're worried about, there are a lot of ways other than multiple deliveries to reduce bandwidth. The most effective is sublists like LISTSERV uses -- distribute the list database to hosts close to the recipients, then send one copy with one address from the master host to the subhosts that then redeliver. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 17:52:37 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id RAA07923; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:50:29 -0800 (PST) Received: from plaidworks.com (plaidworks.com [209.239.169.200]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id RAA07916 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:50:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from [209.239.169.197] (a197.plaidworks.com [209.239.169.197] (may be forged)) by plaidworks.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id SAA14996 ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:05:25 -0800 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20000313193654.U14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> References: <20000313040558.J14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> <200003131930.NAA18763@Mercury.mcs.net> <20000313193654.U14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 17:56:11 -0800 To: Tim Pierce , "David W. Tamkin" From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 7:36 PM -0500 3/13/2000, Tim Pierce wrote: >I would expect VERP-based delivery to be a big draw to potential >list administrators. List managers are always exchanging gossip >about which sites make it easiest to run a mailing list, and handling >bounces are the biggest headache by far that the typical list admin >has to deal with. Eliminating that hassle would be a feather in our >cap for other list managers. > I tend to agree. I know that after buying Smartbounce, after looking at self-implementation and doign ti by hand and all sorts of other options, that SmartBounce paid for itself within two weeks, purely in the reduced man-hours it saved at my billable rate. I haven't (yet) started taking advantage of it's "unsubscribe" processing, but I hope to do that soon, too, to try to pre-process the postmaster mail, and grab another chunk. (today, for instance, I ran smartbounce, and it found and unsubscribed a bit over 50,000 bounces for me on my lists. Do you really want to guess what it'd take for me to do that by hand? shudder. And it did it in about four hours, while I was off doing something else entirely...) -- -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'" From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 18:39:00 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id SAA08394; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:34:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from waltz.rahul.net (waltz.rahul.net [192.160.13.9]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id SAA08387 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:34:12 -0800 (PST) Received: by waltz.rahul.net (Postfix, from userid 511) id 8309F99E53; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:46:48 -0800 (PST) To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery In-reply-to: <4.2.0.58.20000313182851.009bd570@mail.iecc.com> Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 18:46:48 -0800 From: Michelle Dick Message-Id: <20000314024648.8309F99E53@waltz.rahul.net> Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk John Levine wrote: > recipient's message, which permits almost completely automated bounce > handling. This does work, I've used it for ages on lists I run, and it > avoids vast amounts of manual effort on the part of the list admin. FWIW, I don't find myself spending "vast amounts" of time processing bounces the non-verp bounce handler doesn't catch these days. Of course, although I manage several lists, only one is big enough to be concerned about, and then many would consider even it tiny at around 2,000 subscribers. Bounces must have been getting better, because I'd estimate I spend about 30 seconds every 5 days or so figuring out a bounce that my doctored-up smartlist program couldn't handle. Of course, I wouldn't want to do totally without bounce handling, verp or non-verp. Heck, that's why I adopted smartlist so many years ago. It did use to be more time, which is why I think bounces have gotten better. The main reason I'd like to use verp is NOT because of those few remaining bounces, but so that I can include an active html link in the messages so that folks can unsubscribe themselves more easily or do other tasks just with a click. I DO spend about 10 minutes a week either mailing out various administrivia instructions. -- Michelle Dick artemis@rahul.net East Palo Alto, CA From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 19:37:43 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id TAA09033; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 19:29:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.12.23]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id TAA09026 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 19:29:34 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 10202 invoked by uid 50); 14 Mar 2000 03:42:11 -0000 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery References: <20000313214440.1AFC199E51@waltz.rahul.net> In-Reply-To: Michelle Dick's message of "Mon, 13 Mar 2000 13:44:39 -0800" From: Russ Allbery Organization: The Eyrie Date: 13 Mar 2000 19:42:11 -0800 Message-ID: Lines: 25 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) XEmacs/21.1 (Biscayne) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Michelle Dick writes: > I agree. I like the VERP solution too. However, I'm in even a worse > situation than you: the small scale situation. My lists run over a > modem line and are sent to a smarthost that can handle large numbers of > addressees at a time (though I believe I limit it to 500) -- every > addressee gets sent to the same host. So, the bandwidth increase I'd > see would be over several hundred thousand percent increase. Do you have any control at all over your smarthost? If so, you might be able to get *it* to do VERP for you. > I'm in a non-DSL-able location, and other solutions are not cost > effective at this time. My bounce handler works over 90% of the time > (and it's been over a year since I've had one it missed that I couldn't > figure out on my own in less than a minute), so not changing is a > no-brainer. Oh, agreed. If your bounce handler is already working well for you, there's no real reason to change it. And the number of truly annoying bounces seems to have gone down recently. (I think there are also fewer people who have complicated forwarding paths for their mail.) -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) From list-managers-owner Mon Mar 13 21:36:23 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id VAA10235; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 21:21:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from CU.NIH.GOV (silkt.nih.gov [128.231.160.112]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id VAA10221 for ; Mon, 13 Mar 2000 21:21:09 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <200003140521.VAA10221@honor.greatcircle.com> To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: "Roger Fajman" Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 00:31:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk > If anything, I've seen that as a small downside to VERPs: unsophisticated > members see their own addresses in the return path and panic that they're > being forged. Or sometimes the headers will be corrupted above the RFC822 > From: line, so the list member's MUA will see the From: line as part of the > body, ignore it, and try to construct a sender name from the return path, > which will include the recipient's address in the VERP portion, placing it > where even a brand newbie who doesn't know about displaying full headers will > see it; the reaction then is something to witness. (And of course, if it > happens on an unmoderated list, everyone argues "My address was on it!" "No, > you're wrong, mine was!") One public listhost that uses a modification of > ezmlm has tried to reduce the panic factor by using the word "sentto" earlier > in the VERP instead of "errors" as it used to or "return" as some others do. > [Another workaround is to assign a member ID to each subscription and to use > that in the VERP instead of the subscriber's actual address.] We've run into a mail system used by a number of subscribers to some of our lists that bounces messages that have the VERP-type return path used by LISTSERV. I'm not sure whether it's the overall length of the userid or the asterisks in the userid that it objects to. From list-managers-owner Tue Mar 14 07:51:38 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id HAA18588; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 07:39:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from Kitten.mcs.net (Kitten.mcs.com [192.160.127.90]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id HAA18581 for ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 07:39:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from Jupiter.mcs.net (dattier@Jupiter.mcs.net [192.160.127.88]) by Kitten.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA42213; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 09:51:55 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dattier@mcs.net) Received: (from dattier@localhost) by Jupiter.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.8.2) id JAA65222; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 09:51:55 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <200003141551.JAA65222@Jupiter.mcs.net> Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery To: twp@rootsweb.com (Tim Pierce) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 09:51:55 -0600 (CST) From: "David W. Tamkin" Cc: list-managers@greatcircle.com In-Reply-To: <20000313193654.U14159@ma-1.rootsweb.com> from "Tim Pierce" at Mar 13, 2000 07:36:54 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Warning: The true sender is dattier@Jupiter.mcs.net. Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk I asked Tim Pierce, T> ... but how do VERPs improve the word-of- mouth? He replied, P> I would expect VERP-based delivery to be a big draw to potential P> list administrators. List managers are always exchanging gossip P> about which sites make it easiest to run a mailing list ... Ah, you were talking about the word-of-mouth from listowner to listowner about a list host, not about that from list subscriber to list subscriber about a list. Thanks for explaining. From list-managers-owner Tue Mar 14 08:06:50 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id HAA18738; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 07:54:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from Kitten.mcs.net (Kitten.mcs.com [192.160.127.90]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id HAA18731 for ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 07:54:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from Jupiter.mcs.net (dattier@Jupiter.mcs.net [192.160.127.88]) by Kitten.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA43959; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 10:07:00 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dattier@mcs.net) Received: (from dattier@localhost) by Jupiter.mcs.net (8.9.3/8.8.2) id KAA66599; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 10:07:00 -0600 (CST) Message-Id: <200003141607.KAA66599@Jupiter.mcs.net> Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery To: RAF@CU.NIH.GOV (Roger Fajman) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 10:07:00 -0600 (CST) From: "David W. Tamkin" Cc: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM In-Reply-To: <200003140521.VAA10221@honor.greatcircle.com> from "Roger Fajman" at Mar 14, 2000 12:31:21 AM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Warning: The true sender is dattier@Jupiter.mcs.net. Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Roger Fajman wrote, | We've run into a mail system used by a number of subscribers to some of | our lists that bounces messages that have the VERP-type return path used | by LISTSERV. I'm not sure whether it's the overall length of the userid | or the asterisks in the userid that it objects to. Replacing the asterisks and the elements of the subscriber's address in the return path with an alphanumeric subscriber ID would get rid of the unex- pected characters and also decrease the length. It would also reduce the panicking when an MUA presents a post with no From: header (or whose From: header has been disconnected into the body) to the sub- scriber as coming from listname-owner-articleID-your=address.here@list.host. Maybe in extreme cases it's not so far out an idea. From list-managers-owner Tue Mar 14 11:21:20 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id LAA21155; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 11:16:37 -0800 (PST) Received: from one.elistx.com (one.elistx.com [209.116.252.130]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id LAA21126 for ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 11:16:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from two.elistx.com (ppp.elistx.com [209.116.254.209]) by eListX.com (PMDF V5.2-32 #43584) with ESMTP id <0FRF00BHWFDRQE@eListX.com> for list-managers@GreatCircle.COM; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 14:27:28 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 14:24:50 -0500 From: James M Galvin Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery In-reply-to: "13 Mar 2000 04:05:58 EST." <"20000313040558.J14159"@ma-1.rootsweb.com> To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Reply-to: James M Galvin Message-id: <0FRF00BHXFDRQE@eListX.com> Content-id: <24586.953061890.0@two.elistx.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <24586.953061890.1@two.elistx.com> This whole discussion of VERP versus batched for better bounce processing seems to have overlooked an arguably preferable solution: MTAs should return the Internet standard delivery status notification message. This has, in fact, been occurring. I've seen a dramatic increase in the last 6 months in the use of the standard DSN. I don't have any hard numbers although I can say that my hit rate for fully processing bounce messages has inched to 85% from 80%, for those elists that are a problem. What that means is the larger an elist gets or the lower the frequency of messages, the more problematic managing the bounces becomes. I divide my elists into two broad categories: those for which the bounce processing is 100% for all practical purposes and those for which I just can not get ahead. By the way, I have trouble believing that SmartBounce gets 97% because I see a new error message at least once a week, but then such statistics are based on your subscriber community so anything is possible. Overall, my community is worldwide and quite varied. Heck, I get error messages in foreign languages almost every day, which result in frequent updates to my parsing routines. In fairness, I do have to admit I've been thinking a lot about VERP distribution, for all the reasons already discussed. Even now I have too many to think about failed messages that come back with no indication or an ambiguous indication as to which address failed. It is a personnel drain to deal with them, although lately we discovered that letting them fail and keeping good records counts for a lot. We've been getting lucky lately getting similar failures across multiple elists, and the intersection can be quite revealing. Jim ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <24586.953061890.2@two.elistx.com> Content-Description: Contact Information -- James M. Galvin, Ph.D. Principal eList eXpress LLC +1 410.549.4619 607 Trixsam Road +1 561.619.2450 FAX Sykesville, MD 21784 http://www.elistx.com Delivering your email, your way. There are only two ways to live your life; one as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is. - Albert Einstein ------- =_aaaaaaaaaa0-- From list-managers-owner Tue Mar 14 13:51:10 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA23032; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:48:48 -0800 (PST) Received: from public.lists.apple.com (public.lists.apple.com [17.254.0.151]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id NAA23025 for ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:48:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from [17.216.27.198] (A17-216-27-198.apple.com [17.216.27.198]) by public.lists.apple.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id NAA55120 ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:59:28 -0800 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <0FRF00BHXFDRQE@eListX.com> References: <0FRF00BHXFDRQE@eListX.com> Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:58:52 -0800 To: James M Galvin , list-managers@GreatCircle.COM From: Chuq Von Rospach Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched delivery Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk At 2:24 PM -0500 3/14/2000, James M Galvin wrote: > >By the way, I have trouble believing that SmartBounce gets 97% because I >see a new error message at least once a week, but then such statistics >are based on your subscriber community so anything is possible. I'd say it does -- I've got one of the most diverse groups of addresses out there, especially internationally, and the only places Smartbounce has problems are things where *I*, manually can't figure out what the subscribed address is, and international sites that translate their error messages.... I can get 200 megabytes of bounce mail out of a mailing without working hard, and SmartBounce will leave me 1-2 megabytes that needs manual looking at. I can't argue with that. -- -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'" From list-managers-owner Tue Mar 14 14:06:10 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id NAA23128; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:55:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from mta2.snfc21.pbi.net (mta2.snfc21.pbi.net [206.13.28.123]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id NAA23116 for ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 13:54:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from SeaPort1 ([63.196.185.150]) by mta2.snfc21.pbi.net (Sun Internet Mail Server sims.3.5.1999.09.16.21.57.p8) with SMTP id <0FRF00LDCMGYGT@mta2.snfc21.pbi.net> for list-managers@GreatCircle.COM; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 14:00:35 -0800 (PST) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 14:08:57 -0800 From: Dave Reinhardt Subject: install MJ? To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Message-id: <38CEB879B4.297FDAVE@mail.pacbell.net> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Becky! ver 1.25.07 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk If this is the wrong list for this question please tell me. can you tell me how to get this info off the server? # You need to have or create a user and group which majordomo will run as. # Enter the numeric UID and GID (not their names!) here: W_USER = 55515 W_GROUP = 55515 I have a user majordom that has email access and its dir is /usr/local/majordomo ther is also a dir usr/local/majordomo-1.94.4 there seems to be a user called daemon Owner of many system processes / thanks dave From list-managers-owner Wed Mar 15 02:06:17 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id BAA01242; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 01:55:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.uned.es (mail.uned.es [193.146.241.9]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id BAA01226 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 01:54:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from csi.uned.es (obelix.csi.uned.es [193.146.241.10]) by mail.uned.es (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA08266 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 11:07:20 +0100 Message-ID: <38CF613A.3EEA5948@csi.uned.es> Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 11:08:58 +0100 From: Manuel Nogales Casares X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: Weblist Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Hello: I'm new in this list. my question is : Is there any weblist to manage majordomo? I have webmin and esquire, but I want that users can creates their mailing list, and users can only manage their list. PD: weblist :--> software to mange majordomo by web -- ,.........................................,........................., : Manuel Nogales Casares Email: mnogales@csi.uned.es : : Técnico Comunicaciones CSI-UNED : Tel: (+34) 91-398-6634 : : Universidad N. de Educacion a Distancia : Fax: (+34) 91-398-7667 : : Senda del Rey, s/n. : : : E-28040 Madrid SPAIN : Linux User 140.716 : '.........................................:.........................' From list-managers-owner Wed Mar 15 06:53:46 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id GAA05701; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 06:45:13 -0800 (PST) Received: from pop.mccte.educ.msu.edu (pop.mccte.educ.msu.edu [35.8.172.5]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id GAA05692 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 06:45:08 -0800 (PST) From: steelea2@pop.mccte.educ.msu.edu Received: from localhost (steelea2@localhost) by pop.mccte.educ.msu.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA00608 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 10:09:47 -0500 Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 10:09:47 -0500 (EST) To: list-managers@greatcircle.com Subject: virtual domains Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk I have been struggling with setting up majordomo to handle lists comming to multiple domains, I think it has something to do with problems in my /etc/aliases file, or a sendmail configuration if anyone on this list knows of a good, concise resource for configuring virtual domains with majordomo and covers some of sendmail, i would appreciate it thanks /aaron From list-managers-owner Wed Mar 15 07:36:33 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id HAA06165; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 07:32:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from openworld.co.uk (post.openworld.co.uk [194.207.107.3]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with ESMTP id HAA06158 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 07:32:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from ow45 (194.207.107.197) by openworld.co.uk with ESMTP (Eudora Internet Mail Server 2.2.2); Wed, 15 Mar 2000 15:29:32 +0000 Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000315145516.065831b0@post.openworld.co.uk> X-Sender: alistair@post.openworld.co.uk X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.2 Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 15:41:18 +0000 To: list-managers@greatcircle.com From: Alistair Formby Subject: Use of a database with list server software Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: list-managers-owner@GreatCircle.COM Precedence: bulk Dear list, I have been looking for a solution to my problem for quite a while now and I haven't come up with an adequate one. I have looked at several large and expensive solutions like ListServ and other smaller players like majordomo to handle the job for me. So far I have come to the conclusion that majordomo may be my best bet as I currently use majordomo and am familiar with Perl. I also like the idea of using PHP to dynamically drive the front end. Does anyone know of a feasible alternative my problem? Alistair Formby, aformby@openworld.co.uk P.S. I have noticed the recent spate of conversations about 'VERP versus batched delivery'. I find that there are so many subscribers that try to unsubscribe from e-mail accounts that have been 'forwarded to' from another account. It makes the unsubscription process that much easier when sending mails out one by one, due to the fact that when sending batch deliveries I cannot make the 'To' header the subscribers e-mail address. I typically see a 50% increase in bandswidth usage when sending using VERP (not too sure what the acronym VERP stands for though). From list-managers-owner Wed Mar 15 11:36:14 2000 Received: (majordom@localhost) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-Lists-980720-1) id KAA09583; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 10:59:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.12.23]) by honor.greatcircle.com (8.8.5/Honor-980202-1) with SMTP id KAA09576 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 10:59:45 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 29354 invoked by uid 50); 15 Mar 2000 19:12:39 -0000 To: list-managers@GreatCircle.COM Subject: Re: VERPs versus batched del