[TowerTalk] geo888@cs.com

[Jim Lux]

At 07:50 AM 1/10/2005, Mike D. wrote:
> > Not just you.  Every poster gets this.  One way to eliminate
> > the faulty subscription is to filter the responder, but this
> > listserv may not support filtering at that level.  Another
> > way is to delete the subscriber list and require all
> > subscribers to re-subscribe.  This has been done on other
> > reflectors in the past to clean them up.
>
>It would be simpler to eliminate subscriptions from e-mail forwarding
>accounts (e.g. qsl.net, arrl.net, amsat.org, ieee.org, etc.). I administer
>several lists using MAILMAN software, like this list. All of my lists
>prohibit subscriptions from forwarding accounts.
>
>73 de Mike, N9BOR

But this raises problems for those who LIKE the redirection provided by an 
email alias.  You could send email to my ieee.org address forever, without 
having to worry about where I might work now.  This is particularly 
important when you put email addresses on things which have long durations 
(like journal articles).

Or, for personal email, if you decide to change ISPs (or your ISP changes 
their domain name), it's much easier to change the redirect in a few 
places, rather than all the places you've happened to subscribe over the years.

Mind you, it DOES create a problem if you don't take on the responsibility 
for keeping things up to date.

One could also argue that the mailing list owner should periodically "test" 
all the target emails (one by one) to see which ones bounce (even from an 
alias). Many lists (including this one) send out monthly reminders, and 
within the reminder email is the address to which the message was sent. If 
the bounces from those emails came back to the list administrator, it would 
be a simple matter to figure it out. It's even easier, if the subject line 
included the email address, then you don't have to count on the bounce 
process sending back the original email.

In fact, that brings up an interesting question, why aren't those monthly 
messages to geo888 at cs.com's alias getting bounced back to 
mailman-bounces at contesting.com?