[lopsa-discuss] Suggestions for Member Benefits

[Gene Rackow]

Andrew Maddox made the following keystrokes:
 >This came up as an idea in talking with a cousin of mine who's in IEEE. 
 >They offer mail aliases to their members as <name>@ieee.org, which they'll 
 >then forward to the realworld address of the member's choice. Move, change 
 >ISPs, whatever? They just change the alias, giving you effectively a 
 >permanent mail address to give people. I think some other professional 
 >techie orgs do this, too (ACM, maybe? not sure).

I agree this is something easy to do.  Unfortunately a couple of the places
that do it are not really keeping up with the tech.  They run a simple
mail relay.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Lots of spam mail is, at least
for now, stopped by simple greylisting.  There are many other tools for
antivirus activities.

In running some rather large mailing lists, it becomes interesting
what sort of bounces occur when one of your clients is running
something more restrictive than you are.  Many times mail gets
rejected by the remote server, and now you have a bounce to deal
with.  In the cases caused by many of the recent virus laden mail,
the original was forged so the bounce is now stuck.

I do agree that this could be a very reasonable service to provide
people.  It's not as simple or issue free as some may think.  I'm sure
people with the right talents to set this up are involved and can
do a good job with it.  It does need to be planned and properly executed.
I know of several of these types of servers that have really become
less useful than one would hope because they became spam targets.  Things
have gotten so bad with a couple of them that people have started to
abandon the use of that address.

--Gene