Stop complaining about the undelivered messages from ALASKA

[Roberto Shironoshita]

WARNING:  If you are not interested in the bounced-back messages from
          the brain-damaged mailer at ALASKA, go on to the next message.

WARNING2: This is a rather long one.

twb at hoqaz.UUCP (BEATTIE) [<1340 at hoqaz.UUCP>], 
schmidt at BONNIE.ICS.UCI.EDU (Douglas C. Schmidt) [<12368 at brl-adm.ARPA>],
jejones at mcrware.UUCP (James Jones) [<611 at mcrware.UUCP>],
richardh at killer.UUCP (Richard Hargrove) [<3693 at killer.UUCP>],
qwerty at drutx.ATT.COM (Brian Jones) [<6951 at drutx.ATT.COM>],

all complain about the 100+ "Undelivered message" articles that have
come from ALASKA (BitNet) as a result of a user that no longer exists,
and a brain-damaged mailer.

FLAME ON

Since you all complain about the net-cluttering from these messages,
why did you post at all?  You are doing exactly the same as the poor
brain-damaged mailer at ALASKA, except that you are sentient and thus
supposedly know what you are doing.  Let us try to stick to C issues.

FLAME OFF


ASBESTOS ON

I know this article is close to being in the same category as the ones
above (and those that will come), but I felt it was necessary to post
this one.

ASBESTOS OFF


When I noticed the heavy traffic bouncing back from ALASKA, I sent a
message to the following people:

postmaster at NDSUVM1.bitnet, postmaster at ALASKA.bitnet,
postmaster at UWAVM.bitnet, postmaster at brl-smoke.apra

The list administrator at NDSUVM1 (INFO at NDSUVM1), sent me the
following reply:

>    Unfortunately, all this happened at a time when I didn't get on
> to our Postmaster ID...  As soon as I saw over 200 items waiting I
> KNEW something was up.  I am sorry about the delay.  I deleted the
> ALASKA person as soon as I got on this afternoon.
>    Ironically, if the error message had been sent to the "Sender:"
> rather than the "Reply-To" field, they would never have gotten
> propogated.  In fact, the BITNET/EARN/NetNorth subscribers never saw
> them because LISTSERV (the software which does the redistribution)
> correctly filtered these out (and sent them to me... :-( ).
>    I have had errors from the Alaska system before.  I am not an
> expert on RFC822 but I think most processes send the errors to the
> "From:" or "Sender:" addresses, rather than the "Reply-To:".
>    If this continues to be a problem, I could probably go through
> the lists I redistribute and pull off all the ALASKA node
> subscribers, but I really don't want to do that.
>    Thank you for bringing this to my attention.  Again, I apologize
> for it taking so long to get the person deleted from the
> redistribution list.

The point is, you are annoyed, and so is everybody else.  Don't
complain to the net; complain to those responsible at the problematic
sites.

                                  Roberto Shironoshita
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
1- The University doesn't know I exist.   | Internet:
2- Of course I may be wrong.              |   shirono at grasp.cis.upenn.edu