[ale] wku.edu bounce

[Jay Loden]

UPDATE: I received a reply from the email help at wku with an answer...read it 
below, along with my response.

On 9/12/05, emailhelp wrote:
> Jay,
>
> The reason why it is giving you that message is because somehow, your
> e-mail account, which is supposed to be a gmail.com address, is linked
> to toughguy.net, which is a site that I had blocked due to spam issues.
>
> Emailhelp
> Administrative Systems & Applications
> Western Kentucky University

My email subscription to the ALE mailing list is through my
toughguy.net account. Toughguy.net is a free mail service from
hotpop.com used by thousands of people...that's like blocking
hotmail.com or yahoo.com email, and that seems an unusual practice for
a professional organization like WKU.

If nothing else, can you at least turn off the bounce message? sending
that bounce message causes extra traffic, returns mail to the mailing
list over and over with that message, etc. Further, most spam has
forged headers anyway, so replying to it causes you to reply to the
forged from address - lots of spammers and phishing sites use this to
"joe job" someone they don't like, causing lots of traffic or angry
email to be redirected at their domain. None of the above is terribly
useful or helpful.

While I understand spam can be difficult to deal with, it's far safer
to use content filtering than blacklisting domains, especially ones
used by legitimate email providers. While it's certainly not my
decision as to what you do with your email system, I can tell you that
there are many of us out there that would greatly appreciate it if you
would disable the autoresponse message. Even if your users are not
going to receive messages from those of us with blacklisted domains,
the mailing list members as a whole would certainly appreciate not
being inundated with WKU messages telling us not to send bulk mail,
when a) someone with a WKU email address subscribed in the first place
and b) we are a legitimate mailing list for Linux users

-Jay