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Re: [ProgSoc] Whitelist perhaps?



On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:56 am, Andrew Halliday wrote:
> On 8/10/05, Michael Dale <mdale@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Marcus Schappi wrote:
> > > here here!
> >
> > Yes, why didn't we have that in the first place?
>
> I believe we did, but stupid folk couldn't decided which email address
> to use, and some people got confused and tried to send email from
> unregistered addresses.

Bingo.  Back when I was CSO, I set up whitelisting, and I eventually just 
removed the damn thing, because it was such a waste of my and everyone else's 
time.  If everyone sent all their email from their progsoc address, and we 
didn't want to listen to people from outside progsoc, it'd be fantastic, but 
as it was I was basically on a daily basis having to forward everybody's 
email to the list, because everybody wanted to use different email addresses 
(or often, multiple ones) to post from.  Even when I set up a whitelist to 
start adding these addresses to, it didn't help all that much, and it was 
still a huge waste of my time.

Now of course, most people never realise this, which is why we on a regular 
basis seem to get these calls of "I don't want spam, bring on the 
whitelisting!", because when it's not you having to actually maintain the 
system, everything always looks easy.

> Can majordomo do an autoreply to people saying something like:
> YOU AREN'T SUBSCRIBED TO THIS LIST
>
> as otherwise people just don't get the message, and ignore the
> majordomo bounce as spam.
Well, that's what the majordomo bounces are, notifications that people aren't 
on the list.  And, from my experience, even when you send a personal email to 
a person telling them the problem, they still don't fix it.

In other words, whitelisting is not likely to happen again any time soon 
(though I'll bet it'll happen again in a year or two when everyone forgets, 
and we'll go through it all over again), it's been tried, and it failed.  And 
really, are we *that* delicate we can't survive any spam?  These rare mail 
floods are the exception, not the rule, and if someone wanted to flood us 
they still can, just spoof a subscribed address and you're in.
-- 
David Edney
President
UTS Programmers' Society

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