John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
This feels too abusable. We know that spammers sign up for sham
accounts at freemail services and send themselves lots of spam to
game systems that use a complaint percentage. They could easily set
up a lot of fake forwards, which feel like they'd be useful for some
kind of statistics gaming.
But the forward would only be validated for those users who validated
it, so the spammers gain only the ability to spam their own accounts.
Also, in the real world, there are legitimate forwards to people who
have only the dimmest concept that mail is being forwarded to them.
For example, my church has a temporary Sunday school director with
an AOL account. His email skills are rudimentary, so rather than
trying to set him up in the IMAP or web mail that everyone else
uses, I forwarded the director's role account, which is in a lot of
address books and mailing lists, to his AOL account. Getting him to
do a magic message thing would be non-trivial.
Does he know the address of the role account? That's all he'd need.
(Also, the system need not work for everybody; 10% information is a
lot higher than providers get now.)
Seth
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