On Sunday 29 February 2004 11:06, David Woodhouse wrote:
Getting adopted is easy. Getting adopted by _spammers_ less so. Unless
it gets to the point where you can reject everyone who offers DATA
without HEADER, it doesn't actually help with anything but mail which
has already been accepted and forwarded by an innocent (albeit clueless)
third party.
Quite the opposite: provided that using or not using HEAD does not affect the
ultimate chances of acceptance, there is no reason for spammers to avoid it.
Indeed since their messages are more likely to be rejected, spammers would
benefit from the bandwidth savings just as much as their victims.
Unfortunately there is no benefit for legit senders - they do not expect a
significant proportion of their messages to be rejected!
At the end of the day, spammers will try to avoid being detected as such by
trying to look as legit as possible. They would use gladly use HEAD if the
majority of legit senders do, and not otherwise.
- Dan