Re: [exim] Use of hashes to fix forwarding

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Jethro R Binks wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Peter Bowyer wrote:
>
> > So if one of your users asks a question about an eBay item which
> > another of your users is selling, you get incoming mail with your
> > domain in the envelope sender.
>
> While I can't give any other examples, it being a very long time
> since I considered implementing a rule like this, eBay isn't the
> only service that does this sort of thing.

We (we of the departmental mailer, I mean, not the campus central
mailer) test for this form of abuse and freeze the item for postmaster
inspection. With certain exceptions... (which indeed include
ebay.com).

I can confirm your remarks. Quite a number of web news services,
magazines, even some scientific journals, offer some variant of "email
this web reference to a friend", and contrive to collect both sender
and recipient email addresses (which is why I personally wouldn't use
them, but that's by the by), and fake the supplied-but-untested sender
address into the envelope-sender of the resulting mail. There's even
at least one virtual postcard service which does much the same.

Perhaps we should be rejecting[1] them as a form of abuse, and
educating people how to copy/paste a URL into a personal mail instead
of casually scattering around the email address of someone who hadn't
consented to having it used in that way.

cheers

[1] At SMTP time, obviously. No point in bouncing the item to the
purported envelope-sender address!!!