[e2e] latest spate of cruft postings to e2e

[Mark Baugher]

At 12:09 AM 11/14/2003, simon at limmat.switch.ch wrote:
>Spencer Dawkins writes:
> > Now, could we talk about something on-charter? (ASRG is the next
> > list over!)
>
>Well, this is certainly a problem to which an end-to-end argument can
>be applied.  The function of deciding what is unwanted
>end2end-interest mail can really only be completely and correctly
>performed at the receiving end.  (Personally I mostly delegate this
>decision to SpamAssassin 2.60 these days, and this reliably catches
>all the recent spam on the list, for my personal definition of spam.)

Spamassassin breaks my mail connectivity in at least one important way:  It 
throws away my mother's email unless it is explicitly white listed.  So if 
someone wants to spam me, all they need to do is use my mother's email 
address in the from address.  This is my doing: I bought her a $35 email 
machine from Circuit City after she was unable to get her PC set up 
properly.  She loves the machine, but it gives her a yahoo address that is 
configured to use homerelay.com to be the relay.  It's spoofed but 
legit.  False positive but an annoying one for me and would have been much 
worse if I did not call her every week.

Such problems abound.  Curbing spam is a middle-to-middle problem and not 
and end-to-end problem IMHO.

Mark


>"Low level mechanisms to support these functions are justified only as
>performance enhancements."  For example, the mailing list exploder
>could mark messages from non-subscriber addresses with a special
>header (something like "X-Sender-Address-Is-Subscribed: No"), which
>receivers could then use as input to their filtering mechanism.
>
>I would certainly not use such a header myself, but apparently it
>could make some others happy.
>--
>Simon.