About three years ago, I signed up to download a demo of some product from a company called Pramati. I believe the product was Pramati Studio, but it doesn’t matter, as the product wasn’t for me at the time. Just today, I get an email with a subject line of: Welcome to the “Marketing” mailing list. Interesting since I don’t recall ever signing up for a “Marketing” mailing list with Pramati, but I read on. The email is a standard Mailman response when you sign up to mailing list running Mailman. It goes on to say that if I want to post to the mailing list, I can send an email to:
NICE! The part that amused me the most was that Pramati was kind enough to provide me a password to manage my options on the mailing list using the following URL:
http://mail/mailman/listinfo/marketing
Even better! And as you can see, it works great! Since none of the information was correct, I sent a reply to the email, also including postmaster@pramati.com. As one would figure, I got invalid command response from the mailinglist. Even better though was the response from postmaster@pramati.com:
This is the Postfix program at host mail.pramati.com.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.
For further assistance, please send mail to
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the message returned below.
The Postfix program
: permission denied. Command output: procmail: Insufficient privileges

Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.pramati.com
Arrival-Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 06:33:08 +0530 (IST) Final-Recipient: rfc822; root@pramati.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; permission denied. Command output: procmail:
Insufficient privileges
Outstanding! What the hell are these guys doing over there? And what kind of company involuntarily signs up people to a mailinglist? Pramati makes some nice stuff, I hope they don’t let they’re marketing team soil their reputation.
Damnhandy 