Re: Why am I no longer receiving the digest?
On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 11:25:15AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 04:12:36AM +0100, Pigeon wrote:
> > Thanks, that's useful to know... so presumably when it does get going
> > again, I'll receive 100 digests in a lump? duplicating a few thousand
> > messages? But if I block the duplicates, the list server gets error
> > returns and automatically unsubscribes me (or so I understand). Oh well.
>
> No need to return errors on the duplicates. You could just drop them
> into /dev/null.
Sorry, I know that. I'm thinking of actually not downloading them over
dialup from the POP3 server. I know more or less nothing about the
inner workings of email transmission and delivery, but the consensus
on this list as to what to do with spam seems to be to deliver it to
/dev/null as anything else either returns errors to the spammer which
they can use for evil purposes, or accidentally spams with error
messages some innocent whose address has been forged in the From header.
Checking through man fetchmail it seems that this may not necessarily
be the case as if the MTA can be configured to return error 553 on
unwanted mail no error will be returned to the sender, and the same
for various other "spamblock" error codes if the spambounce option is
off. However, unless you're using IMAP, which my ISP doesn't, it's
always going to download the entire message body before dumping it.
Avoiding the unnecessary downloading is of more concern to me than
the duplicate messages in my mailbox.
I'm being thick, aren't I. I can just unsubscribe from the digest
temporarily, check www.faqchest.org to see when it gets going again
and then resubscribe. Or would I still get the digests from March 31st
up until today? Probably. Oh well.
(Funny how wanted mail becomes spam in the wrong context. Like the sound
of an EE 16CSVT on full bore...)
Pigeon
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