Misguided SPAM Filtering techniques

Tue Oct 23 00:44:49 UTC 2007

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:13:52 MDT, Sean Figgins said:

> And, is it really a burden if you SEND me an email to validate yourself?  If it 
> IS such a burden, then I invite you not to send email to start with, especially 
> not to me.

That would be all fine and good - if I was being asked to validate mail that
I actually sent to you.  I've seen very few true positives for this, compared
to two *large* classes of false positives:

1) I'm being asked to verify my address because some malware found my address
on a hard drive and stuck it in the From: field.  I'm sorry, but if you're
asking me to verify that, it *is* a burden - you are admittedly *starting off*
assuming that it's bad and *needs* some sort of verification.  So by definition,
you're imposing on people to validate that they're real.

2) The rest of the time, I'm being asked to verify myself because I posted
to a mailing list, and some idiot failed to whitelist the list address.

Homework question:  Does this method scale?  What would happen to your inbox
if *everybody* on this list did this sort of thing?

(Bonus points for figuring out what happens when two people who *both* use
this scheme try to exchange email.  Hint - my system didn't recognize your
C/R format, and concluded it was an e-mail addressed to me.  What happens next?)

> (Please respond only through the list)

This is NANOG. If you wish to hijack the semantics of my REPLY button,
feel free to actually include a Reply-To: field that expresses the semantics
that you desire.  
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