Re: Mail-Transmitter RR

[Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>]

Ted Lemon <Ted.Lemon@nominum.com> writes:

> > Agreed.  I send mail from my laptop, which travels with me all over
> > the place, but my From address is elsewhere.  How is my home address
> > supposed to know what IP address I'm using at any particular point in
> > time?
> 
> You contact an SMTP server for your domain over SSL, authenticate yourself,
>   and drop the main on that server, which can then safely forward it.

Who is "you" in this case?  My MUA?  My MTA?  I'm currently running
sendmail on my laptop.  My MUA just passes the mail on to there, and
it gets forwarded appropriately.  This is a nice feature because there
are many times when I have better connectivity between my laptop and
my recipient than I would going from laptop->home->recipient.  Are you
saying that instead of distributing the load of mail I now have to
centralize mail delivery just because people are abusing the
distributed nature?

> So don't use MAIL-FROM if it doesn't work for you.   I think this is
> an unlikely problem, though.   I use a remote mail drop for every
> email message I send, and it has never caused me any inconvenience.

Perhaps your definition of inconvenience and mine are different?  But
consider this: if not everyone is doing it, then what's the point?  If
it's not a ubiquitous solution, then it's not going to solve the spam
problem.  All it will do is prevent spammers from forging a valid
email address to recipients that have agreements with that individual.

I was hit by this today... Some spammer used my address to send out a
bunch of messages, and I was lucky enough to get all the bounces into
my inbox.  I certainly did not know any of the recipients whose mail
bounced back to me.  So, how would this have helped me (or them) in
this case, especially if you're telling me not to use it?

> This proposal doesn't solve the spam problem, but it _does_ make it
> harder for spammers to get away with forging email addresses, which
> would be a big improvement.   What's more, it does not require that
> you agree to it.   It only requires that people who are victims of
> forgery agree to it, and that people who care about forgery agree to
> it.   So if you don't like it, don'
> t do it.

See, I'm not convinced it will make it much more difficult unless it's
a upqiwuitous deployment, and I believe that the functionality that is
destroyed by deploying this technology is not worth the perceived
benefit.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available

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