Test messages to -questions

[Nikolas Britton]

On 7/1/05, Bart Silverstrim <bsilver at chrononomicon.com> wrote:
> 
> [deleted]
> 
> While proposing ways to stop people from sending test messages to
> lists, can someone find a way to filter out top posting as well? :-)

I'm not trying to stop anybody. I'm purposing ping for SMTP, The
construct is like an echo request. So when you send a blank message
with a subject such as test or ping the mail server replies to the
email saying it got the email. The mail server that acknowledges this
email would be whatever was listed in the DNS MX record of the email
address that was entered in the to: field. So if I ping the email
address questions at freebsd.org then {mx1,mx2}.freebsd.org replies back
to say it got the message. I think this could be a useful diagnostic
tool.
 
> 
> Actually, fbsd_user is right; wouldn't sending tests only test if you
> can send test messages to the test group while not at all verifying
> that membership and configuration is correct for posting and getting
> messages to and from the FBSD-questions list?

No the mail all goes to the same server. When you subscribe to the
group the mail server send you a confirmation email that you must
reply to and then it sends a welcome email.

> 
> I think the more intelligent approach to "test" the connection would be
> to actually send some kind of question a new user would have about
> FreeBSD to the list as a sly way of testing the configuration, but
> that's just me.

What about this?