On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Tomas Fasth wrote:
* even those that do will have to know to ignore (obviously) empty
MAIL FROM addresses - so do implementations that support this action
need exception handlers to deal with an invalid return address? Or
simply silently disregard them?
This is already defined in the standards. DSNs are not sent if there is
an empty "MAIL FROM" address, so "reject" would be equivlent to "discard"
in this case.
Ouch. Are you suggesting that the transfer from reject to discard would
be
done silently without giving a chance to the scripter to do something
else?
Sure. What would be more appropriate? If you're going to refuse messages,
then you're really going to refuse messages. If you don't want to refuse
messages, don't refuse messages. What's the problem?
Agreed. But Sieve is designed for much more than just
UCE/UBE/SPAM/whatever. See my previous message for why a "bounce/reject"
action provides vital functionality.
Don't you think an automatic repetitive reject (whatever cause) can be
regarded as a kind of spam?
No, it's not spam in any sense of the word -- it's not unsolicited.
What guarantee do you have that the receiver
of the delivery rejection notification know how to handle such a message?
What do you intend by this? How can someone not be ready to handle a bounce
message?
If the traffic is fluent, s/he might instead (wrongly but possibly)
decide
to order his filtering device to reject such stream of junk mail which,
as
you decribed above, might result in a silent discard because the lack of
an originator address.
Good.
We now have a stream of messages taking up network resources and with no
other purpose than using brute force (using automating tools) to
convince
a fellow netizen to stop sending messages. Some might regard that as
spamming as well.
They would be wrong for all of the reasons described above.
What you're saying is that if A sends B a mesasge, and B sets up his mailer
to reject A's messages, and A sets up his mailer to reject B's rejects, that
A is likely to keep sending mail to B in the hopes that his mailer will
somehow change its behavior. I think this is absurd.
--
Tim Showalter
tjs(_at_)andrew(_dot_)cmu(_dot_)edu