On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, John R. Levine wrote:
Here's some scenarios in which I'm not sure what the best thing is to do.
A) User has multiple incoming accounts, presses the spam button, and the
outbound MSA doesn't match the incoming account. Hence the report goes via
unrelated third parties that might snoop on it. Do we care? The user has
said it's spam, after all.
The user trusts his good outgoing mail to that MTA - why should she not
trust her spam to the same MTA?
B) Assume a model in which the spam reporting address is determined per
account, e.g., fetched from the POP or IMAP server via an extension. The
user for whatever reason moves a message from account A into the IMAP mailbox
for account B and then hits the spam button, which sends the report to B,
even though the message was from A. Do we care? It's the user's fault,
although I can think of some simple configurations that would cause that,
e.g., MUA based spam filter that puts all the junk into the Junk folder on
the first IMAP account.
The ARF system at the MTA may examine the headers to make sure the report
came through it or it has the potential to process ARF reports possibly
intended for another MTA. Howeever, this is not a serious mistake, if it
is one at all. If MTA A revises its content filter based on what it learns
from a spam sent through MTA B, then no harm has been done.
C) I have a Gmail account and a Yahoo account. The Gmail account is set up
to fetch my Yahoo mail so I can see it all in one place. I use Gmail's IMAP
server to read my mail. (I really do this, by the way.) I hit the spam
button. Who should get the report?
1) Gmail since that's who I picked it up from
2) Yahoo since that's where the spam was sent
3) Gmail but they should also forward the report to Yahoo
GMAIL is your MUA. It should report to Yahoo, but I don't see any harm in
it acting on the information itself. Lots of MUAs have built in spam
filters - it is perfectly reasonable that the TIS button help those
filters.
Daniel Feenberg
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