Re: zmailer suggestion

[Nicholas_Briggs.PARC@xerox.com]

Yes, I agree 100% regarding reliability and trust, but:  it's questionable
whether the person who runs a mailing list is going to be particularly happy
when some mailer s/he has no control over starts bombarding either the senders
or the redistribution source address with non-delivery reports because some
postmaster has been asked not to forward "precedence: junk" mail to a
particular machine.

I have experienced this problem personally:  our internal mail system
guarantees that it will either deliver the message within a specificed amount
of time (time depending on the urgency) or return a non-delivery notice.  You
wouldn't believe how many mailing list maintainers either sent e-mail or called
me saying "I don't give a !@#%^ that this message to [you name the list] wasn't
delivered to J. Random User at Xerox.  Stop sending these non-delivery reports
or i'll take *all* Xerox addresses *off* this list".

Fortunately, we could pretty much identify internal addresses which were "junk
mail" distribution lists, and for those lists we do not gateway back the
non-delivery notices.

In the proposal that was made, I think that the "Precedence: Junk" is enough of
a hint on the part of the sender that they really don't care to get
non-delivery reports (but again, i'll emphasize that it should be logged so
that if questions do arise there is some trace of the message disposition).

					\nick