On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 08:20 AM, Kee Hinckley wrote:
I'd like to ask what people feel about making it a part of anti-spam
system such that if say somebody is sending same content message to
more
then 5-10 recepients on your server, then it has to be considered
maillist email and has to contain proper maillist headers and opt-out
information.
Well, first of all it doesn't scale. Someone who sends to 5-10
recipients at somewhere.com just exceeded the number of humans with
addresses there. Someone who sends to 5-10 AOL users is just in the
noise.
But more critically.
But more critically, off the top of my head.
It breaks all majordomo installations out there. (all of them would
have to be updated to either the unreleased Majordomo II, Mailman,
Sympa, or something). It also breaks any mail list where an admin has
disabled those headers because he doesn't like them (which, if you
check out the mailman archives, has been a continuing discussion,
mostly because, it seems, eudora for windows doesn't hide those
headers, and admins therefore break the mail list software instead of
fixing the client. But I'm not bitter)
It breaks all of those people who have extended announce lists in their
address books.
It breaks all people who set up informal lists via sendmail aliases or
their equivalent in other MTAs.
It breaks 5-6 emails I send a day to a bunch of individuals. Never does
it seem to be the same 5-6 individuals.
It breaks all sorts of things. Does it solve anything? No. spammers
will simply start adding those lines, since there seems to be no intent
to see if the lines actually are valid or relevant (and how would you?)
In other words, we've re-invented the "Approved: header" in the
NNTP/USENET protocol, meaning we haven't really invented anything
useful unless the user population agrees to manage it voluntarily or
there's some form of cyber-cancel bot to retro-delete the stuff.
Sorry, not a good proposal.
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