[IP] 2 on an editorial comment on on Earthlink to deploy challenge-response antispam system

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com>
Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad
Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 18:50:10 -0700
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [IP] an editorial comment on on Earthlink to deploy
challenge-response antispam system

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 09:04:32PM -0400, Dave Farber wrote:
> If I start getting a flood of challenges from earthlink ipers that require
> my response I will most likely declare them SPAM and you will stop receiving
> IP mail. 
> 
> I fully expect this to be the case for almost all the legitimate mailing
> lists you are on and count on.
> 
> See if their system allows you to pre-approve lists you are on else ....

Dave, Challenge/Reponse lists have been in use for 6 years on the net.
Autoresponding programs like vacation programs have been around for
decades!

It has become the standard for mailing lists to include the header
"Precedence: bulk" (or junk) in their body, so that vacation programs
and other autoresponders will not send responses back to the list, or even
to the list manager.

My 6 year old challenge/response program follows that standard, and anybody
with a basic understanding of how to write such a tool would do the same.
You don't challenge mailing list mail.   You must spot it and summarize
all mail that wasn't challenged (or to which the challenge was unresponded)
so the user can detect any mailing lists they wanted to join.  Fortunately,
a daily summary of the headers, subjects and first lines of all E-mail, even
the 300 spams a day I get to my bot, is not much of a burden to handle.

So your reaction, and Declan's, is really uncalled for, unless you know
that Earthlink or anybody else is violating the decades old accepted
practices for autoresponders.

I will note that you are sending out with "Precedence: list" which is
a less common form of this header.

It is worth noting that even though these headers are a good idea, they have
not been endorsed in an RFC and were even deprecated in RFC 2076 some
time ago.  However, the ones that were well known enough to be
deprecated (with no replacement) were "Precedence: bulk" and "Precedence:
first-class" so I would stick with "bulk" rather than "list" in your
own headers.


------ End of Forwarded Message


------ Forwarded Message
From: Meng Weng Wong <mengwong@dumbo.pobox.com>
Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 04:59:40 -0400
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: Can we fix

no problem, i've set it to 'bulk' instead of 'list' for IP.  hope that
doesn't break anything for the subscribers :)


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