At 10:42 PM 3/27/97 +0200, era eriksson wrote:
(And the reason you want to allow for something random before the
actual e-mail address is that people can put most anything in their
From: field but the e-mail address has to be in there somewhere in
unadultered form. The message you're reading right now is From: era
eriksson <reriksso(_at_)cc(_dot_)helsinki(_dot_)fi> but I could change the "era
eriksson" part very easily. [Changing the e-mail address part isn't
all that hard but changing that is essentially forgery whereas nobody
would get upset if I changed the name part.])
I disagree. I change the email address not to point to the account
I'm posting from all the time. I have 5 email accounts (3 corporate
and 2 ISP's), and I prepare a bunch of mail at home and send it out
all at once "From:" my different accounts.
In fact, to be more precise, the account I'm sending from now gets almost
no email directly; most goes to the account in the "From:" address you
see on this message -- because (if you haven't guessed) -- I can run
it through procmail there, and then forward what I want to a POP account
where I can easily download stuff and read it offline. During the
download, I telnet to the shell account and read what else is left,
and maybe modify .procmailrc if it missed something.
A quick scan of *all* the headers of this message will reveal its
"true" origin, but both accounts are mine anyway.
I think "forgery" is not the act of changing but rather the act of
changing it to point *to someone else* (or a non-existent mail address).
Of course, you're going to have to be a lot more clever to fool
people due to other headers inserted along the way (details of those
are probably beyond the scope of this list, or at least of this thread;
I suggest SPAM-L for anyone interested).
Cheers,
Stan