Re: very private e-mail

At 12:39 2003-11-04 -0100, Klaus Johannes Rusch wrote:

> See http://tmda.net/ or search for "procmail challenge response" using your
> favorite search engines for implementations and opinions on this type of
> filtering (in short, works well as long as the senders are not
> robots/autoresponders that ignore your polite request for sending a 
> response to your challenge)
*AND* this causes specific troubles for operators of discussion lists, as 
well as the participants on same.  IF you're going to use a 
challenge-response (C-R) system, be prepared to either fail to be able to 
confirm s*bscriptions to new lists (when a never-before-seen email address 
sends you a message requesting you to confirm your s*bscription by hitting 
a website or replying with some specific text), or to get booted from lists 
when the admin finds you're responsible for autoreplies of this nature to 
every participant.
Be prepared to deal (or more appropriatley, NOT deal) with people who 
decide that it isn't THEIR job to safeguard your inbox, and once they 
receive a challenge when they're REPLYING to a message you posted on a 
list, they opt to dump your mail rather than deal with the added work.
Further, take a few moments to consider the outcome of when YOUR C-R system 
sends a message in response to someone elses' C-R (say, a different 
implementation, so implementation-specific safeguards against this will 
prove completely worthless).
You're much better off just whitelisting the people/lists you communicate 
with - you'll likely lose much less mail, and will certainly annoy fewer 
people.
I've seen enough people start using one of these systems and annoy the heck 
out of tons of other people, or of the listadmin, and I've seen people fail 
to be able to sign up for a list because their C-R system belts thest 
things out at the listprocessor, and then they go emailing some support 
person, via an address they find on a webpage, but the actual support 
response comes from a different address, meaning even if your C-R system 
auto-whitelists addresses you send messages to, the reply may still have to 
contend with the C-R process.  The systems which insist on sending these 
responses out automatically for each incoming message, rather than sorting 
out which addresses have been queried already, are exceptionally annoying - 
by the time the responsible user even becomes aware that they're causing a 
big problem for others, they've already been kicked off the list, and been 
inserted into several individual killfiles, never to be removed.
Consider also VIRUSES.  You know - the ones that forge the sender and From: 
addresses to be some poor sap who just happens to be in the saves email or 
addressbook of the infected user.  Similarly, SPAM joe-jobs, where a 
spammer deliberatley forges their From: to be the address of some poor sod 
who has nothing to do with it, except perhaps the spammer knows that guy 
complained about the spammer previously.
C-R isn't a cure - it offloads your problem onto other people - people who 
are not responsible for your spam problem 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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