[e2e] was Re: A message to authors - nsdi

[Michael Welzl]

On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 14:07 -0800, Sharad Agarwal wrote:
> > But couldn't that kind of process also be applied now, just with a NACK
> > (because, being a spammer, I'm the sender and receiver)?
> > I get some free email accounts and send spam everywhere, and check
> > (maybe automatically) if it made it - if it didn't, I'll know.
> 
> True, you can do that. But only to the Hotmails and Yahoos of the world. You wouldn't be able to do that to say the microsoft.com or eecs.berkeley.edu mail systems. With the ACK or NACK system, then you could test any email domain that implements it.

But if spammers really want to do this, say, to microsoft.com,
surely they could find an automated response system somewhere
at microsoft.com which they could use for the same purpose?

Or, alternatively, send enough pointless emails to people working
at microsoft.com until they get a vacation message - so they get
addresses which they could use to get an autoresponse anyway
for doing this kind of test.

What if it's not Microsoft but company XY which is too small for
this kind of thing to work? Well, then we could simply flood
them instead of doing this test - after all the reason for
doing the test instead of simply flooding is probably to reduce
the required number of messages, which will only be a problem
if the company is really big.

I'm making wild guesses at this point, though...

Cheers,
Michael