Re: [Asrg] Iteration #3.

Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> Sun, 07 February 2010 16:42 UTC

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Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:42:25 -0500
From: Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Iteration #3.
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On Sun, 7 Feb 2010, John Levine wrote:

>> For this reason the MTA operator would probably want to discard
>> messages to the arf reporting address unless they were submitted via
>> the MSA submission port, or came from inside the MTA operators own
>> network.
>
> That doesn't sound like a very good idea.  When I was providing mail
> for the customers of a local web hosting company, I tried really hard
> to get them to use my MSA, since it made the management and trouble
> diagnosis a lot easier.  No matter what I did, I never got more than
> half of them to do so.  The rest just used some other account,
> generally their local ISP, because it mostly worked.
>
> These days lots of people pick up their mail from Gmail, but who knows
> how they send it.  I know people who have Gmail pick up their ISP
> mailbox since they like the sorting and spam filtering better, but did
> they change their outgoing setup?  I doubt it.
>
> Once again, I would ask people to try really hard to avoid assuming
> that all, or even many, mail systems are just like yours, since that
> leads to false assumtions and poor designs.

I said "probably". There are certainly other ways the MTA operator could 
distinguish legitimate reports from forgeries, if necessary.

Daniel Feenberg

>
> R's,
> John
>
>
>
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