Server setup

[Eric Thomas <]

Having received dozens of delivery errors from mailers all over Europe, I
now understand that you have thought  to prevent mailing loops by setting
the  return  address   to  the  poster's  address.   This  is  completely
ridiculous! I  have strictly  no interest  in learning  the names  of the
dozen  people who  are  unable to  receive their  mail  because of  X.400
congestion,  unknown internal  error  23, you  name  it. Furthermore  the
reason there are so many people who cannot receive their mail is that you
are asking the mailers to send delivery errors to the posters, who cannot
do anything about  them and are probably not forwarding  them to you, out
of courtesy or under  the assumption that you also got  a copy, which you
did not. The errors should go to the list owners, who have the ability to
take action to correct the situation.
 
The alternative  is to ask everyone  to please forward any  and all error
they get  after posting to any  RARE list to dixon@localhost.  Is that what
you want us to  do? BITNET has over 6 years  of experience with automatic
mailing list managers, how to operate them from a remote machine, what to
do  with delivery  errors of  this or  that type,  and so  on. The  "list
owners" have developed de facto  customs and guidelines through their own
forum, LSTOWN-L. Maybe  RARE should invest manpower  in documenting these
practices instead  of going  through the  painful process  of reinventing
the wheel from scratch - and at the subscribers' expense, to boot.
 
  Eric