[reSIProcate] Administrative Notice: MTA Policies and your resiprocate list subscription.

[Alan Hawrylyshen]

Fellow reSIProcate developers;

Lately I have noticed a larger than usual bounce rate in delivering the 
reSIProcate mailing list messages to subscribers.  It appears that 
there is a 'new MTA rule' making the rounds that people have 
implemented in a misguided attempt to stop SPAM.  I'm sure the rule 
lowers the number of SPAM messages that are delivered to users within 
the MTA's domain, but the false-positive rate is unreasonable.

These bounces are resulting in people being unsubscribed (or having 
delivery suppressed) without their knowledge.

 From my studies of the bounce messages the best description of the MTA 
rule is:

	Does the message contain non US-ASCII characters that are valid 
non-roman characters?

If this is true, the MTA rejects the message, typically with a terse, 
somewhat rude message like:

    550 Sorry, noone speaks chinese here (in reply to end of DATA 
command)

These are being triggered when any of our reSIProcate developers post a 
message to the list that contains either headers with non-roman UTF-8 
OR perhaps non-roman UTF-8 characters in the DATA portion of the SMTP 
transfer.  (I'm not sure which it is.)

I personally think this rule is short-sighted and makes the rather 
'interesting'  assumption that you do not wish to communicate with 
anyone that writes ANYTHING in a language other than English.

I consider it a major benefit that we have a diverse community, and 
that we see multi-lingual signatures and names.

I do not want any of our members to make changes to their signatures or 
posts to accommodate these broken MTAs. I DO want you to be aware of 
this problem, and to check with YOUR e-mail administration to ensure 
that they are taking measures to allow your reSIProcate (and I presume 
other) e-mail to continue reaching your inbox.

Thanks for reading this far! I'm tempted to sign my name in Hiragana or 
something, but I want everyone to see this message. :-)

Thanks

Alan Hawrylyshen
reSIProcate Project Administrator
http://resiprocate.org/