At 07:50 2002-12-10 -0800, Bart Schaefer did say:
Unfortunately this practice is now causing spam problems of its own:
Harvesters mistake message-id strings for email addresses and send spam to
them.
I've been seeing this on regular domain-type messageids through email. It
seems that spammers are leeching onto anything which has an @ in the middle
and vaguely resembles an email address in syntax.
Of course it all bounces, but for a large domain that emits lots of
usenet postings (like, say, the University of Washington), I'll bet it
generates a huge amount of wasted network traffic.
If some utility were put into place to react to that specific format of
address and submit the sending host to a blacklist (or just locally reject
future messages from that host, whether addressed to a messageid or not),
then at least something could be reclaimed from the waste.
Remember, it's the spammers who are abusing the system who are wasting
network traffic.
Heck, I'm the only person in the brasslantern.com domain who ever posts to
usenet or to mailing lists, and I've been seeing spam aimed at message-id
strings from postings made five years or more ago.
Which certainly makes Pines hashed messageid rather appealing. I've got to
figure that they're hashing it so that any given host domain still produces
a unique hash code. It would make a lot of sense to do it that way at least.
I have some messageid advisory rules, as well as a number of freemail and
large ISP "forgery" checks - based on the knowledge that messages
originating from those domains do contain the domain in the messageid (one
shouldn't expect many legitimate hotmail messages from other ISPs - though
yes, some people set their From: address to their hotmail and send through
their own ISP, though *I* don't correspond with many people using those
services to begin with).
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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