Re: [Asrg] Forwarding again, was Adding a spam button to MUAs

Seth <sethb@panix.com> Thu, 10 December 2009 06:33 UTC

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From: Seth <sethb@panix.com>
To: asrg@irtf.org
In-reply-to: <20091210062104.24857.qmail@simone.iecc.com> (message from John Levine on 10 Dec 2009 06:21:04 -0000)
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Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:33:43 -0500
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Forwarding again, was Adding a spam button to MUAs
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> This feels too abusable.  We know that spammers sign up for sham
> accounts at freemail services and send themselves lots of spam to
> game systems that use a complaint percentage.  They could easily set
> up a lot of fake forwards, which feel like they'd be useful for some
> kind of statistics gaming.

But the forward would only be validated for those users who validated
it, so the spammers gain only the ability to spam their own accounts.

> Also, in the real world, there are legitimate forwards to people who
> have only the dimmest concept that mail is being forwarded to them.
> For example, my church has a temporary Sunday school director with
> an AOL account.  His email skills are rudimentary, so rather than
> trying to set him up in the IMAP or web mail that everyone else
> uses, I forwarded the director's role account, which is in a lot of
> address books and mailing lists, to his AOL account.  Getting him to
> do a magic message thing would be non-trivial.

Does he know the address of the role account?  That's all he'd need.

(Also, the system need not work for everybody; 10% information is a
lot higher than providers get now.)

Seth