On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 12:25, Alan Hodgson wrote:
Unfortunately it is exactly spam in the UCE sense. Your message is no more or
less important in the grand scheme of things than anyone else's, and no more
worthy of cost-shifting receipt. It took me a while to learn that lesson,
but learn it I have.
If the postmaster account is useless now because of changes in the
social nature of the Internet, then it should be removed as a
requirement. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing the postmaster
account is meant for?
Section 4.5.1 of 2821 doesn't mention a suggested usage, but 4.5.5 does,
and referrers to "someone who is able to fix problems". This implies
"reactive" reasons to contact the postmaster. Are there any references
to contacting the postmaster for "proactive" reasons -- my quick search
didn't turn any up.
I find the logic in 822's section C.6 "Reserved Address" to be
questionable:
"The local-part "Postmaster" has been reserved, so that users can
be guaranteed at least one valid address at a site."
Who are these "users" (senders, recipients or admins?), and why do
they need to be guaranteed an address at any site/domain? Senders should
be sending to specific local-parts, not just to the domain.
Not that I think this bulk-sending to all postmasters is a good idea --
I don't, but only because of how the usefulness of the postmaster
account has changed due to number of domains, the volume of spam sent to
the postmaster and many of the problems postmasters are notified of are
non-actionable (like virus warnings and spoofed addresses).
Here's an interesting post about connecting back to the source IP and
testing for the existence of the postmaster account:
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/2004-03/3648.html
Could this be used as some kind of validation attempt?
--
Andy Bakun <spf(_at_)leave-it-to-grace(_dot_)com>