On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 04:01:10PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > If a domain was set up to be treated this way for an unrelated reasons > without an announcement anywhere, surely that is even worse ! Well, it's no longer "DSA is making misleading statements about the nature of the problem"; the fact that you weren't notified when this was done is bad, but it could be that they tried to contact you and failed for whatever reason, so I certainly reserve any judgement until both sides have commented... > > On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 12:18:45PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > > > * The mail backlog that `will never be able to be delivered' was > > > (as far as I can tell) all spam that chiark has been properly > > > rejecting. > > No: there is nothing "proper" about rejecting mail from a host that you have > > configured to forward mail for you. > Nearly all of this mail flow is invalid in one way or another. Of course it is. That doesn't make it "proper" to reject such mail when you've told some other host to forward it to you in the first place; I'm sure it's a pretty common misconfiguration in the context of Debian mail forwarding, but that doesn't make it right... > What is happening is that master provides a mail forwarding facility > with a lax input policy, but I forward my mail to chiark which does > stricter checks and has a stricter policy. > This has the effect of turning the rejected messages into bounced > bounces on master. This would be an unfriendly thing to do if the > sysadmins on master actually cared about reliable mail delivery and > took a policy of reviewing bounced bounces and dealing with their > causes (as I do on chiark). It's an unfriendly thing to do *anyway*. Performance of Debian mail service has sucked for a while, and based on my own experiences running such systems, I have no doubt that bounced forwards account for a lot of this sluggishness, not even counting the one particular user who was clogging the system with gigs of mail. Ryan now seems to be making quite a bit of progress on fixing these problems with the mail setup -- not just with eliminating antisocial mail forwarding configs, but also with making improvements on the input side so master doesn't *have* to store and forward so much garbage email. Like many others, my first reaction is "Finally! Thank GOD!", but obviously DSA is comprised of volunteers like everything in Debian, and kudos are certainly due for his work on this - even if some of the changes may have been implemented in a suboptimal fashion. Anyway, the line in question is still in master's exim4 config; you may want to try sending a mail to debian-admin, let them know what you've done on your end, and ask if there's anything still preventing its removal... > But, there is another important point: I don't really want a > debian.org address. It's technically necessary for me to have one for > (eg) cronmail from debian systems, and additionally I feel that there > is an (unwritten) rule that I should have one. But it is simply > untenable to suggest that I ought to accept all of this junkmail and > actually read it ! So accept it and auto-discard it instead, if you prefer; but don't throw it back at master after telling master to send it to you. > > ... procmail? > How would that help ? I could arrange for procmail to try to detect > whether (eg) the mail had ever been through any non-debian.org host > and if so construct a bounce. But this is no better and no worse than > me having chiark rejecting the mails at SMTP time. It would still > lead to master having to deal with lots of undeliverable bounces. Why would you need to bounce instead of discarding? If it's not a valid contact address for you, I don't see why you would be so concerned about sending notifications to people trying to use it. That was relevant 5-10 years ago; today it's a waste of resources. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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