RE: bogofilter ate 3/5

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On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Stuart MacDonald wrote:

From: Chase Venters [mailto:[email protected]]
highly ironic that spam blocker services tell you not to use certain
techniques (autoresponders, bounce messages) that are not only
commonplace, but precedented and even mandated by RFC on the
grounds that
they may cause you to be blocked. Then they move on to
criticize anti-spam
techniques that fall in these domains with one of their
subpoints saying
'they can cause you to miss legitimate mail!'

Guess what: so does indiscriminately blocking people whose
sites don't bow
down to your unreasonable demands, especially when their
behavior (say,
sending bounce messages) is described in the official protocol
documentation.

I will assume you are referring to SpamCop. Their service does not
behave the way you think it does:
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?autocom=custom&page=whatis
Read the paragraph: "SpamCop works exactly like the credit reporting
agencies..."


What are you implying - that SpamCop doesn't make decisions about who to block and who to not block for third parties? Their weasel wording comparing themselves to credit reporting is pretty weak and doesn't stand
a chance of obscuring their purpose, methods or results from anyone with half
a clue. But let's pretend that it did for just long enough that I can point out that because of the coercive nature of credit agency decisions, they are expected to behave reasonably as well. Saying, "but the creditors are making the decisions and we're just providing data!" is no excuse for credit reporting agencies to, say, give low credit scores to people who live in a certain part of town, or practice a certain religion, or happen to have skin of a certain color.

I will strongly criticize any service that purports to label senders of automatic responses as senders of unsolicited mail. The response sent by an autoresponder (be it a deferral, bounce, vacation or mailing list manager message) is most definitely solicited. The fact that Internet mail is broken enough to allow terribly easy envelope forgery does not change this fact. Trying to defer responsibility for a misdirected automatic response to the program or party using the program that sent it is like trying to blame gun manufacturers for specific instances of murder; it's absurd and it misses the point.

Whether or not SpamCop servers actually drop any messages is irrelevant when they are providing purportedly reputable data to third parties who use it to decide whether or not to drop messages themselves. The sad fact is that most postmasters just aren't educated enough about these issues to see through the glossy marketing materials RBLs and other services use to promote their wares.

And on the specific issue of autoresponders, I think a reasonable compromise is to support DomainKeys. That way if a sender is irritated that they are receiving automatic responses from messages they didn't send, they can personally take action to invalidate the forgery.

But mark my words: Asking hosts to stop sending bounce messages or automatic responses is insane and contrary to over a decade of established postmaster precedent.


..Stu


Thanks,
Chase
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