At 01:58 AM 4/13/2008, you wrote:
Why should large companies participate here about mail issues? Last I checked this wasn't the mailing list for these issues:
True, though some aspects of mail service are inextricably tied to broader networking issues, and thus participation here might still benefit them. But sadly Yahoo doesn't even seem to participate in more relevant forums, such as the spam-l list.
But lets just say for a second this is the place to discuss company xys's mail issue. What benefit do they have participating here? Likely they'll be hounded by people who have some disdain for their company and no matter what they do they will still be evil or wrong in some way.
I've never seen someone treated badly for trying to help resolve problems. I think we all know that it can be hard to get things done within a large company and that often the folks who participate on a list like this are taking on work that isn't strictly speaking "their job" when they try to help resolve mail issues. And when a large company that was a mess does a turnaround, they also get praised: just look at the many positive comments about AOL on this and other lists over the past few years.
It is easy for someone who has 10,000 users to tell someone who has 50 million users what to do when they don't have to work with such a large scale enterprise.
I wouldn't presume to tell them how to accomplish something within their particular configuration. But I will, without apology, tell them that they need to accomplish it. For example, I'm quite comfortable saying that Earthlink should follow the minimum timeouts in RFC 1123, though I wouldn't presume to guess whether they should accomplish that by having separate fast and slow queues on different servers, on the same server, or not at all. Likewise, a working abuse role account is a minimum requirement for participation in the Internet email system, and I'm comfortable saying that the email it receives should be read by a competent human.
I find it funny when smaller companies always tell larger companies what they need to be doing.
When what the larger companies do enables criminal behavior that impacts the very viability of the smaller companies through de factor DoS attacks, it's not funny at all. Yahoo, for example, has chosen a business model (free email with little to no verification) that inevitably leads to spam being originated from their systems. Why should they be able to shift the cost of their business model to me, just because I run a much smaller business?