How to construct this port?

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Thu Dec 28 10:12:13 PST 2006


Ion-Mihai IOnut Tetcu wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 14:36:16 +0200
> Vasil Dimov <vd at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
[ ... ]
>> Do you really block all mails coming from Bulgaria?
> 
> Romania also.
[ ... ]
> Since I saw others doing this, I'd really like a statement from portmgr
> (BCC'ed) that commiters and maintainers are not allowed to reject mail
> like this.  I, for one, would commit via instant maintainer timeout to
> ports belonging this type of maintainers.

It is certainly reasonable to consider a permanent rejection of mail as 
justification for a "maintainer timeout".

It's also fine to tell port maintainers they "should not reject legitimate 
mail"-- whether they block the mail due to broad country/domain filtering, 
RBLs, or some other reason doesn't really matter.

However, sometimes mail systems go down or block traffic for whatever reason: 
postmaster's job is a thankless task, and this was true even before spam and 
viral email appeared.  Nowadays, it's harder to get things mostly right 
(nevermind "perfect"), so postmasters make imperfect decisions because they 
are faced with undesirable tradeoffs.

It has not been my observation that insisting people not make any mistakes 
commonly results in fewer mistakes being made, or much less, in zero mistakes 
being made.  :-)  Rather than try to insist they "are not allowed" to do 
something, I'd prefer to let people make their own decisions and learn which 
ones are mistakes.  YMMV....

-- 
-Chuck



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