At 12:39 PM 8/28/2004 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 04:28 +0800, AccuSpam wrote:
Uh oh. Someone else with an auto-responder. Are you going to stone
him or hang him by his b(_at_)lls?
If he has an autoresponder which responds to the wrong address, or which
responds with message which has a non-empty reverse-path of its own,
then that's a denial of service attack in waiting, and should be
reported as network abuse to the upstream provider.
The joke was that this is not worth fight over.
I do not like when one set of people goes around telling another set of people
that they have to cease and desist because of blah, blah. I think unless there
is an overrriding architectural reason that is widely adhered to, then such
wars are against the freedom and nature of the internet. Thus I oppose them
with vigor.
Please correct me if I am mistaken, I do not have time to go digging for the
post I have in mind, but seems like I remember someone maybe you?) writing
recently that the auto-response must be sent to the Return-Path (SMTP reverse
path), else it is a "violation" in your view. I think that the RFC quoted for
this rule applies to responses sent by the SMTP server (e.g. 4xx, 5xx messages
etc), not generally to all replies sent by the MUA or recipient.
However, if a human replies to a message they may send it to the Reply-To,
Sender, or From, roughly in that order of priority.
How can you know for sure a human replied or a non-human replied? If you are
going to send cease and desist orders, you better be able to prove it, else you
might get counter-sued.
Seems to me that a recipient can send their reply to Reply-To, Sender, or From,
in that order of priority, if they wish to.
Please educate me.