Re: Sender verification

In article <E0wVDqr-0004XI-00@???>,
Dr. Rich Artym <rartym@???> wrote:
: Let's not forget one very important use of invalid sender addresses
: though, namely for preserving anonymity. Invalid sender addresses are
: not in themselves bad,

Yes they are. They make life a pain for everyone who has to
administer things. Furthermore, they violate the RFC's. Finally,
they are a prime cloaking technique for spammers.

This is not a case of a useful tool with occasional misuses, this
is a case of a very ineffective tool (any admin with access to the
sender's logs or network can bypass this "protection" -- and the
IP address provides the info as to which admin can do this) with
routine misuses.

Says me, who owns and operates the longest running anonymous
e-mail and posting service on the net.

Long gone are the days where "be conservative in what you send, be
liberal in what you accept" might work on the Internet. Nowadays,
the policy pretty much has to be "be conservative in what you
send, be a hard-nosed bastard about conformance to standards in
what you accept". Thus, I have sender_verify turned on in my exim
configs....

: On this list, the issue should
: be not how the developer or administrator feels about spam, but how we
: can make Exim implement each ****END USER'S**** spam-filtering wishes.

Yeah sure. *You* run an ISP for awhile. The end users don't give a
damn. They want the spam *out* of their mailboxes and they don't
much care how it happens. By and large, users don't know how to,
don't want to know how to, and rely on their admins to have the
"know how", to set up spam blocks.

While it is nice to put anti-spam tools in the hands of the
end-users, doing so won't materially affect spam. It's when
administrators apply those tools that a dent can be made in spam.
That needs to be the focus, not some unrealizable fantasy of user
control over spam.