At 8:33 PM -0800 2/4/97, Brad Knowles wrote:
> I don't think AOL would fare any better, but perhaps you folks
>could prove me wrong.
If I were asked to allow a gateway, I'd certainly consider it. If
someone just goes and does it under my nose, I might be a little more
irritated. (actually, I know that a number of addresses on MACWAY and
other of my lists are exploders. How many, I don't know. To be honest,
if someone asks me to add an exploder or a re-mailer to the list, I say
no. If they don't know enough how to do it for themselves, chances are
that remailer will be nothing but problems for me, in my experience...
So there's a little triage there... grin)
> The issue of posting becomes a problem, however. If a list only
>allows subscribed users to post, how do the hundreds (or thousands)
>of AOL users who are "subscribed" to the list via Usenet news post to
>it? Unfortunately, they don't (which makes the idea virtually
>useless to most of them).
Yeah. Here's the rub. If I'm asked to allow a *bi-directional* gateway
from AOL, I say no, because I no longer have the ability to nuke off
bad users from AOL without shutting down the entire gateway or having
to go to the aol postmasters to help, and frankly, they're probably
tired of hearing from me already. And I won't allow non-subscribers to
post, and I have no way of knowing if they're subscribed on a gateway
or re-mailer.
Now, in reality, 90% of most mailing lists are lurkers, so a single
directional gateway can do a lot to reduce loads and the like. But the
hassle and complexity it adds, not to mention confusion to that one
user who almost always reads but wants to post on a special topic,
makes the human interface aspects of this a horror show on all sides. I
think it could be done, but I don't think it'd be easy.
(one way would be to have a special inbound mail address from AOL,
where I could put a procmail blocker to shut up anyone who's abused the
gateway, and refuse mail from any place other than a known, approved
gateway. But I still have heebee-jeebees about this....)
In the right circumstances, though, figuring this out would be more
than worth it, especially for a list like MACWAY, where I've got 3,600
subscribers on AOL. Even batching stuff together, that's a chunk of
bandwidth we can clean up, if there's a way to clean it up right.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
<http://www.solutions.apple.com/>
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com) <http://www.plaidworks.com/>
(<http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/> +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
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