[Toybox] bounces

[Rob Landley]

On 09/04/2017 08:04 PM, Robert Thompson wrote:
> the antispam algorithms care more about the mailserver delivering the
> spam and less about the maildomain of the spam. Thus, the toybox list is
> already near spam thresholds due to the large amounts of actual spam
> originating from dreamhost mailservers.
> 
> I'm unfortunately more familiar with the underlying details than I want
> to be; up until a few years ago, I was responsible for a large
> organization's mail servers and antispam systems. It's nearly impossible
> to ensure that all spam gets caught while same-origin ham gets through.
> 
> I have a mail rule that autoreplies to toybox bounce messages, ensuring
> that I get resubscribed even if I don't immediately notice.

[tl;dr: yeah.]

I used to run my own mail/web/dns servers, but I have way too much else
to do these days. Dreamhost is cheap, doesn't meter bandwidth, lets me
ssh and rsync content up to the web part, I can .htaccess enough control
to enable xbithack and implement menus through server side includes so I
don't have to open the javascript can of worms, and keeping it up is
mostly Not My Problem.

It's not the unreliable delivery to gmail that really annoys me. It's
the way it bounces retries repeatedly to cause dreamhost's server to
unsubscribe half the list so I have to go FIX it each time (which
involves loading, clicking checkboxes on, submitting, and selecting the
next of about 20 web pages). It affects about 1/4 of the list's subscribers.

It's especially annoying because (this part's 100% dreamhost's fault) I
have to go home and plug into a wired connection to do this, because
athough dreamhost can let's encrypt to https my main web page it utterly
CAN'T support https on lists.landley.net, and logging in with a
plaintext password over wireless makes me a bit uncomfortable. (Do I
expect them to fix it? Hint: they "temporarily" disabled the list
overview page FIVE YEARS AGO and still haven't restored it, I poke them
annually about that and get blank incomprehension every time.)

Large impersonal bureaucracy failing to talk to other large impersonal
bureaucracy is always a fun failure mode. Gmail and thunderbird having
different ideas about how imap should work is another one of those "this
cannot be fixed using normal methods, and has persisted for many years"
sort of thing. No, Mozilla's maintenance of thunderbird isn't any less
deaf to the outside world than gmail or dreamhost:

  https://lwn.net/Articles/686286/
  https://lwn.net/Articles/722217/

And both gmail and dreamhost are setting a pretty high bar for deaf to
the outside world. (Googling for "gmail mailing list deliver both
copies" the first hit is
https://productforums.google.com/d/topic/gmail/Bhlo0BTB4us but I can't
view that page because it's a login prompt. The issue is described
plenty of other places, like
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/gmail-annoyances.html . That's been
unfixably broken for something like a decade now...)

Rob