Re: Mail-Transmitter RR

["Andy W. Barclay" <abarclay@unixpeople.com>]

Hi Derek,
Actually, I do advocate that you send all mail from your laptop
through your home machine, then on to the final recipient.

This is no different from the way 90% of the population of the Internet 
does things now. Most people don't run sendmail on their laptop.
In fact, I am currently connected to the net via a dsl connection
to sympatico in Canada right now. The sympatico firewalls block
out-bound SMTP, so you are supposed to use their SMTP servers. (I tunnel
smtp to my home server via ssh). This would adversely affect your 
ability to use your laptop as a relay. Lastly, the mail-abuse.com people 
define a method of blocking mail which comes from "dial-up" addresses.

I think that your solution of using your laptop will slowly become
less and less reliable, and I think that both Paul's proposal and
David Green's proposal have merit. (In case anyone is interested,
several of my compatriots are using spamassassin to kill spam,
and its working very well for them (99.5% success rate, .4% false
positives)


Derek Atkins wrote:
> 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
> 



-- 
Regards,
Andy W. Barclay.        abarclay@unixpeople.com
fax  (781) 823-8276
Always a UNIX Evangelist (and sometimes a system and network architect)

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its
credibility. And Vice-Versa.


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