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Re: [Asrg] 3c: *MX through extended ESMTP VRFY extenstion

2004-02-18 20:25:18
David Nicol wrote:
Andreas Saurwein wrote:

At 18/2/2004 22:26 Wednesday, you wrote:

Comments, please?

Only one: Which halfway sane mail administrator has VRFY enabled nowadays?

Are you trying to introduce better address harvesting support for ESMTP or what?
Sorry, I dont get it.

the proposed VRFYVIA does not imply VRFY.

Does LMAP etc. have a response to the "it would facilitate harvesting" argument?
That would apply here too.


There is a key difference between LMAP and your proposal: LMAP only deals with domains, not individual senders. This is why harvesting would be a bigger issue with your proposal rather than LMAP.

However, the same exact issue applies with any kind of SMTP-based challenge response system like Verizon uses. So far we haven't seen any facts on whether it has facilitated harvesting.

The following presentation might be useful, since it looks like the same thing as you are trying to do:

http://www.elan.net/~william/asrg-emailpathverification-presentation.pdf

In general, it is a good idea to consider other means of authentication and identification aside from STMP. The key question is to decide which do we care to identify and authenticate: IP address, domain or individual sender. There is still significant disagreement on that.

Yakov
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Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord Acton)
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