moderation bounces

[Russ Allbery]

Ben Rosengart <br+inn at panix.com> writes:

>   I am running INN 2.3.2 and 2.3.3.  When a user posts to a
> moderated newsgroup and the moderation message bounces, the
> non-delivery notification comes to the news admin address here
> instead of to the user.  This doesn't seem like the best thing.
> The user never finds out about the bounce, and we don't have
> the time or inclination to track down missing moderators, whereas
> the user frequently does.

> Is this a misconfiguration, a bug or a feature?  If it's a
> misconfiguration, what could we be doing wrong?  If it's a bug,
> has it been addressed since 2.3.3?  If it's a feature, what's
> the justification?  Thanks very much.

It's kind of half a bug and half a feature.

There are two basic ways of handling this.  One can either send the mail
as the news admin, or parse the From header and lift the address up into
the envelope sender.  The latter will let the user get the bounce
directly, but given the very widespread use of undeliverable addresses on
Usenet right now, it also means that many messages may get rejected by
spam filters for having an unresolvable envelope sender.  Moderators tend
to get upset at sites that take that approach because they get blamed for
the missing articles and it's hard for the user to work around.

INN has always used the news user as the envelope sender largely because
it's just easier, but given the problems with the other approach, we'll
probably keep doing that.  I wouldn't be adverse to having an option to do
it the other way, for those sites that want to, but it would need to have
a lot of warnings explaining the problems with that approach.

What I personally do is just resend the bounce messages when they come in
to the user posting the original message.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
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