Interesting People mailing list archives
2 on an editorial comment on on Earthlink to deploy challenge-response antispam system
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 07:32:51 -0400
------ Forwarded Message From: Brad Templeton <brad () templetons com> Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 18:50:10 -0700 To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] an editorial comment on on Earthlink to deploy challenge-response antispam system On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 09:04:32PM -0400, Dave Farber wrote:
If I start getting a flood of challenges from earthlink ipers that require my response I will most likely declare them SPAM and you will stop receiving IP mail. I fully expect this to be the case for almost all the legitimate mailing lists you are on and count on. See if their system allows you to pre-approve lists you are on else ....
Dave, Challenge/Reponse lists have been in use for 6 years on the net. Autoresponding programs like vacation programs have been around for decades! It has become the standard for mailing lists to include the header "Precedence: bulk" (or junk) in their body, so that vacation programs and other autoresponders will not send responses back to the list, or even to the list manager. My 6 year old challenge/response program follows that standard, and anybody with a basic understanding of how to write such a tool would do the same. You don't challenge mailing list mail. You must spot it and summarize all mail that wasn't challenged (or to which the challenge was unresponded) so the user can detect any mailing lists they wanted to join. Fortunately, a daily summary of the headers, subjects and first lines of all E-mail, even the 300 spams a day I get to my bot, is not much of a burden to handle. So your reaction, and Declan's, is really uncalled for, unless you know that Earthlink or anybody else is violating the decades old accepted practices for autoresponders. I will note that you are sending out with "Precedence: list" which is a less common form of this header. It is worth noting that even though these headers are a good idea, they have not been endorsed in an RFC and were even deprecated in RFC 2076 some time ago. However, the ones that were well known enough to be deprecated (with no replacement) were "Precedence: bulk" and "Precedence: first-class" so I would stick with "bulk" rather than "list" in your own headers. ------ End of Forwarded Message ------ Forwarded Message From: Meng Weng Wong <mengwong () dumbo pobox com> Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 04:59:40 -0400 To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: Can we fix no problem, i've set it to 'bulk' instead of 'list' for IP. hope that doesn't break anything for the subscribers :) ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- 2 on an editorial comment on on Earthlink to deploy challenge-response antispam system Dave Farber (May 10)