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Re: Mailpush automatic notification




Dear Oleg,

Thank you for the suggestions.  I have spoken to our technical team and they
informed me that in order to avoid sending confirmations to news groups who
send the messages by emails we placed a small filter that solved the problem
for the majority of news groups.  This little solution is by not confirming
on any message who's subject begins with a SPACE.  Please arrange for the
group you are subscribed to, to place a SPACE before the subject and you
will not receive any confirmations from us anymore.

Sincerely

Ariel Kolitz
VP Marketing - N.E.C.S. MailPush
Tel. 972-9-959-9082
Cell. 972-5-254-6464
Fax. 972-9-959-9608

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Dear Ariel,

You and your technical team are apparently missing the whole
point. let me explain to you why the above solution is
unsatisfactory.Consider this:

1) Fact: you provide the notification service that causes problems
   for mailing lists and probably other types of bulk email.

2) Assumption: you want to solve the problem

3) Obvious way to solve the problem: find a way to identify what
   emails should not be replied to with notification messages.

4) Your solution: make one particular mailing list add a space in
   the subject - this space will identify messages that shouldn't
   be replied to.

5) Obvious design flaws in this solution:

   a) You are trying to make others correct the faulty design of your
      software by an ad hoc kludge. I already did that for myself -
      your notifications go straight to /dev/null

   b) this solves a problem for ONE mailing list - what about the
      others? 
 
   c) What about other mails whose subjects start with a space? Maybe 
      there are people who do want these notifications (defending the
      devil!). HSould they take special care *not* to put a space into
      the subject line? What if someone forwards a message with an
      existing subject line? Maybe a message from a mailing list?
      Should he remember to delete the space? I don't think so.

   d) What if another service like yours (you do allow for such a
      possibility, don't you) decides that ey will not send 
      notifications if the subject line starts with _ (underscore)?
      There will be a conflict, right?

   e) In general, you want to skip replies to certain *types* of
      emails, *not* emails on certain *topics*! The action should 
      definitely not be based on the "subject" field.

6) Correct solution - the one I proposed: Instead of relying on a
   space in the beginning of the subject, which will lead to an
   unacceptable fraction of errors of the 1st and the 2nd kind alike,
   rely on the "Precedence:" field, as I suggested. All the mailing
   lists should have it set to "bulk" or "list" (throw in "junk" for
   completeness). Don't forget that these words may be preceded by
   arbitrary whitespace - I assume your technical team will be able to
   implement that. 

   This way you'll implement a proper solution, that doesn't rely on
   the whole Internet putting spaces in the subject lines, and does
   not require any list maintainer to solve your problems for you.

My personal conclusion. You are offering your customers a service that
affects (adversely) an awful lot of people who have not entered any
business relationship with your company. You are aware of the
problem. You should disable this service until you figure out the
proper solution to it, and you shouldn't expect others to solve it for
you. I think I have offered a good solution, which is also used in
other notification software ("vacation"), is no more difficult to
implement than your current one, and is much more robust and
reliable... Why don't you tell your technical team of the flaws I see
with your current approach (I trust they will regard it as I intended
it - as constructive criticism rather than all-round bashing which it
isn't), and of my suggestion. If they reject it, I'd be happy to know
their arguments.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt          goldshmt@netvision.net.il   
BLOOMBERG L.P. (BFM)     oleg@bfr.co.il

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