Message-Id: <200107161940.MAA01102@central.cnet.com>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 12:25:38 GMT+01:00
To: Anders Andersson <andersa@DoCS.UU.SE>
Subject: Re: CNET_Digital_Dispatch@one.digital.cnet.com        (KMM1094913C0KM)
From: CNET Newsletter Support <newsletter-support@cnet.com>
Reply-To: CNET Newsletter Support <newsletter-support@cnet.com>
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Hello andersa@DoCS.UU.SE,
 
That address will be defaulted to our Admin team who really have nothing
to do with user support.  It's only going to be filtered back to us in 
support and we're going to repeat what we've written once again.

Regards,
CNET Support Services 
http://home.cnet.com/?tag=st.cn.support.3

*Please include original message in your reply*


Original message follows: 
-------------------------

[I'm copying this to <postmaster@cnet.com> for his information,
as I initially contacted him about it, thinking he was involved,
and I would like to bring him up to date on the issue.  Maybe
some other postmasters would be interested in this as well, as
this is about processing of delivery error notices in general,
not merely an error with one of your e-mail dispatches.]

CNET Newsletter Support <newsletter-support@cnet.com> wrote:
>If you are experiencing errors with dispatches please report this to 
>either this address or bugs@cnet.com.  Tell us the dispatch name and if

>possible the date and feature you are not able to access.

We, like everybody else on the Internet, have an automated
procedure to report e-mail delivery problems back to the
sender of the message.  That procedure is implemented in the
Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), in our case Sendmail, and depends
on the SMTP envelope sender address being useful for the
purpose of sending error messages to it.  In order to have
our automated procedure send its error messages to some other
address, that address must be given in the SMTP envelope.

Since April, I have noticed about a dozen error messages sent
your way due to your dispatches being sent to undeliverable
addresses in our domains.  It appears you haven't seen those
error messages, which makes me a little disappointed.

You are in effect asking me to intervene manually whenever we
detect a bad address in your mailing list.  The information you
ask for is precisely what we send you automatically, only that
we send it to <CNET_Digital_Dispatch@one.digital.cnet.com>, not
to any address you spell out in the body text of your dispatches
or in your communication with me.  Having to do this manually
creates a lot more work for us, especially since we can normally
expect the automated procedure to work.  It's not very practical
to have a human operator identify the sender and engage in a
technical conversation each time an e-mail message fails to
reach its recipient, and I doubt this is the intent behind your
setup.  With the appearance of spam, triggering hundreds if not
thousands of error messages each day, manual handling becomes an
impossibility.

>The physical act of mailing our dispatches is done by an outside vendor

>which accounts for the digital address.  They are not able to respond 
to
>any bug or error reports only we at CNET are able to address these.  

Thank you for clarifying the situation.  Does your contract with
the outside vendor specify how they should deal with delivery
errors pertaining to the e-mail addresses you provide to them?
When a recipient address is no longer working, will they inform
you about it and ask you to take action, or will they remove the
address from the mailing list themselves, perhaps informing you
after the fact?  Do you provide them with the current mailing
list to use for each dispatch, or do they maintain a copy of the
mailing list based on incremental updates provided by you?

Please don't spend too much time trying to answer every question
above; they are mostly rethorical questions meant to clarify the
problem I see.  If you can solve the problem without further
assistance from me, I'd be happy with that.  However, I may be
able to put you in touch with some experienced Internet users
willing to do consulting for a fee, if you believe you could use
some outside expertise in this matter.  Let me know what you
think.

Regards,
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University
Paper Mail: Box 325, S-751 05 UPPSALA, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 4713170   EMail: andersa@DoCS.UU.SE