For those of us that feel strongly that email should be a reliable transport medium.

[Matt Kettler]

At 04:18 AM 2/11/2004, Julian Field wrote:
> >Julian, I honestly believe you did the right thing removing this
> >functionality. It doesn't belong. If some people get mad about it, let
> >them. Putting the functionality back is just facilitating laziness and
> >creates broken mailservers at the expense of others.
>
>But even better if I can put the functionality back in, but in such a way
>that novice admins have to jump through a lot of hoops to enable it. That
>way it can't be done by accident.
>
>And if I make the subject headers obvious, people can auto-delete the
>notifications.
>
>(just trying to please everyone if possible :-)

I would refrain from describing that as "better" much less "even better".
It is however, a compromise of sorts, and I do respect your desire to
compromise.

Personally, I strongly stand behind the opinion that you'd have to be out
of your mind to put it back in. The feature is little short of being a
malicious attack tool against other networks. In my mind, it's directly
comparable to a setting up a network as a smurf amplifier. By making lots
of hoops you've made it so that the admin has to be willfully malicious to
turn on the feature, but you've still put a feature into a spam filter that
allows spammers to abuse it as an attack tool.

If you must add the feature back in, I'd recommend putting some kind of
"don't blame MailScanner, we told them not to do this" note in the fixed
headers. At least this way people won't be quite as quick to blame
MailScanner for the malicious nature of certain network administrators.
However, I would consider anyone who still blamed MailScanner for it's part
in the attack to be correct in their lay of blame.