Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!giza.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: How to deal with a recalcitrant postmaster? Message-ID: Date: 28 Feb 90 22:03:26 GMT References: <6459@ncar.ucar.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 37 woods@ncar.ucar.edu writes: As a fellow postmaster, the one thing I can 100% GUARANTEE is that [flames/sarcasm] will be ineffective. Anyone who abuses me from outside my organization has all their mail sent to /dev/null... Greg, please, chill out just a bit. When things at this site first started getting screwy some months back, I quite properly (and gently) pointed out the bounces I was getting, and asked that things be fixed so that things wouldn't bounce that way. When it became clear that my forwarded bounces were at best getting temporary fixes and nothing was done In The Large, I started getting a bit uptight about it. It broke again just yesterday. I only got one bounce for it, but I forwarded it to the relevant postmaster with the one-word comment, "Bozos." I think it's appropriate. That can be interpreted abusively, of course, but that's just the way it is. I've gotten a LOT of bounces. As for obligation to forward mail, most of the mailing list recipients for which I have trouble are employees of the vendor in question. I tend to think they'd have a somewhat more serious interest in their own people getting their own mail. Perhaps not, however. When things have been badly enough broken, I've found that I can't even get mail to administrative addresses. For example, last Thursday, I forwarded one of these bounces to postmaster@ven.dor, only to have that bounce back at me also. So I tried the shotgun approach (domains changed to protect the guilty): To: postmaster@ven.dor, uucp@ven.dor, usenet@ven.dor, news@ven.dor, root@ven.dor, daemon@ven.dor, mailer-daemon@ven.dor, sys@ven.dor, adm@ven.dor, admin@ven.dor, lord-only-knows-who-else-i-will-fail-to-find@ven.dor I got a bounce for every single one. --karl