Subj : MakeNL v3.4.1 Release
To   : Vince Coen
From : Michiel van der Vlist
Date : Fri Jul 27 2018 01:25:03

Hello Vince,

On Sunday December 29 2013 19:33, you wrote to Kees van Eeten:

 >> The purpose of the allowpub tag is, that these non existing phone
 >> numbers will be replaced by "-Unpublished-". Apparently there are
 >> mailers that would happily dial such a number.

 >> There are people who have been asking for this feature for over 10
 >> years now.

 VC> No one in the UK has come to me to say that since I changed it that
 VC> they have been any problems connecting to anyone,

That the handful of sysops left in the UK do not have a problem being listed 
with all zero telephone numbers, does not mean that no one else in the world 
has a problem with it either.

Listing "funny" telephone numbers, be it all zero numbers or other undialable 
numbers, in the nodelist is wrong. For the following simple reason:

 MvdV> No matter what some claim, there are POTS/ISDN mailers out there
 MvdV> that can NOT be configured to never attempt to dial certain numbers.
 MvdV> They can translate numbers to add or change dial prefixes and such
 MvdV> and dial the translated number, but they can not be configured to
 MvdV> not dial at all. They are designed on the premise that anything
 MvdV> other than -Unpublished- in field six in the nodelist, is a valid
 MvdV> dialable telephone number.

There is no way to predict what will happen in general with these undialable 
numbers.

 VC> Do you have a list of active mailer that are having this problem?

There is no exhaustive list. I know that InterMail and Dutchie do not have a 
documented way of stopping them from attempting to dial at all.

The only sure way to prevent accidents with older POTS/ISDN mailers is to only 
use "-Unpublished-" for numbers that must mnever be dialed.


Cheers, Michiel

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