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Re: [Asrg] Please critique my anti-spam system

2005-01-07 17:59:51
No innocent user will ever get an erroneous bounce if a few of the
large consumer ISP adopt the system;
[???]
I was unclear.  What I meant was that it would be a simple matter for
and email provider to recognize a bounce sent via my system.

Yes, though it's questionable whether anyone would want to implement
special-case recognition for every new C/R challenge out there.  I
certainly am not interested in doing so.

Perhaps this needs to be another FUSSP criterion: "it assumes it's the
only system in use, or at least that everyone will be willing to add
special cases for it".

The email provider could then check to see if the recipient had
previously sent out an email to the supposed source of the bounce.

So, no more road-warrior outgoing email?  All must be tunneled back to
home?  (Nothing wrong with that per se, but it certainly could be made
clearer, as it will be an important caveat.)

If the recipient had not sent out this earlier email then the bounce
that is coming in must obviously be an erroneous bounce and it would
then be blocked.  Now there is no chance that anyone would receive an
erroneous bounce.

Well, no.  Not anyone.  Only people behind such checks.

If my system is used on a small scale then I would not expect any
email provider to lift a finger to adjust their system to filter out
these erroneous emails.  If, however, some of the large consumer
email providers used this system then I believe that most other email
providers would recognize this system and begin filtering out
erroneous bounces as described above.

Yes - but that can be done without needing your system.  My mailer
already rejects most bounces of mail I didn't send.  ("Most" because
the check it does is a relatively weak one and every once in a while it
mistakes a forgery for mail I sent.  So far this has not happened
frequently enough to make me soup up the check.)  Of course, this
depends on all mail I send exhibiting certain characteristics, which I
make sure it does.

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