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  • From: Tanner Lovelace <lovelace AT wayfarer.org>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] interactive spam block
  • Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 00:56:25 -0400

Alan MacHett said the following on 4/5/04 11:10 PM:
It's only mildly annoying, but I just thought of a potential glitch. What
if I had to send a legitimate mass mailing and many of the addresses were
at Earthlink? Now I'm stuck having to respond to a sizeable number of
these automated responses. Or what if so-n-so AT earthlink.net signs onto a
listserv for the first time and the listserv sends an automated response,
to which it gets an automated response to which the listserv will never
respond, and then the person in question becomes irritated that he can't
seem to get signed up on the listserv.

Even worse. What if someone forges e-mail from you and sends it to
thousands or hundreds of thousands of earthlink subscribers! Now, all
of a sudden, you're innundated with thousands and thousands of these
challenges. Welcome to being joe-jobbed.

From what I've seen out there, there are extremely few if any challenge
response systems without serious problems. See
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/challenge-response.html for more
info. It sounds like a nice idea at first, but unfortunately, it
provides new ways to screw systems over. On the mailing lists I run
the rule is the first time I see a misconfigured challenge response
system sending e-mail to either the list or to list members from list
postings the person who's system it is gets unsubscribed, no questions
asked.

Cheers,
Tanner
--
Tanner Lovelace | Don't move! Or I'll fill ya full of... little
lovelace AT wayfarer.org | yellow bolts of light! - Commander John Crichton




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