NANOG List Update - Moving Forward

Tue Jul 12 17:05:16 UTC 2011

On 7/12/11 10:37 AM, Jared Mauch wrote:
> You seem to be new here.
>

Since you asked, no, been around alot longer then I care to remember.

> bulk_mailer was something used back in the day to workaround
> limitations in sendmail for those people operating majordomo (and
> those using smail etc).  it broke the chunks into something that
> sendmail would then allocate multiple processes to.  most other mail
> subsystems can handle the multiple-rcpts in different manners.

I actually was writing sendmail mc/cf files back in the 90s, and used to 
have a reasonably high traffic majordomo setup.  Don't remember anything 
about bulk_mailer, but then again I stopped using majordomo around 10 
years ago, so my memory may be going on stuff like that.

>
> while it may 'feel' spammy to you, it's certainly not.

Hey, I call it as I see it.  When you get to pour through spamtraps all 
day and evening looking at headers for common traits, yeah, things like 
'bulk_mailer' stand out.

>
> a simple google of "majordomo and bulk_mailer" should give you a good
> idea of what's going on.

Googling generic terms is quite fruitless these days, esp when all the 
spammers like to call their products bulk mailers.  But, thank you for 
pointing out the context it is used in.

I'm not the only one who expressed curiosity over this 'bulk_mailer' 
program, so please don't shoot me just cause I mentioned something about 
a pretty generic program name that throws up red flags whenever I see it.

-- 
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org    /     http://www.ahbl.org