Subject: Re: Vacation draft

From: Michael Haardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 14:26:31 +0200

> you have too little faith in the common sense of judges.  a spammer
> claiming that a vacation message or a bounce (both should have "MAIL
> FROM:<>") is opting-in would be laughed out of court.

I have pretty much no faith at all in the common sense of judges when
it comes to technical issues indeed, and good reasons for doing so.
It may be a German issue, but I doubt it.  I could imagine very well that
a spammer using vacation based opt-in does not get in serious trouble
for a year or even longer over here.  Hell, even without that he may
not get any trouble.  All you can do is subscribing his administrative
addresses to his own list, among others. :-( But that's another point.

First of all, users will be annoyed by being subscribed to a list, and
be very annoyed if subscribed to multiple lists.  Vacation MUST contain
heuristics to lock out mailing lists and their owner/request addresses,
but there is no safe way to detect them.  Subscribing typical users to
old-style lists without web interface causes them grief to no end and
there are enough idiots around having fun doing so.

Michael

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From: Kjetil Torgrim Homme <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 15:37:24 +0200

(please include References or In-Reply-To in your messages, every new
message from you creates a new thread, which is inconvenient.)

> addresses to his own list, among others. :-( But that's another point.

yes, I don't think fixing the German judiciary system is practically
possible for Sieve :-)

> there are enough idiots around having fun doing so.

there are plenty of lists which don't require confirmation messages,
either.  Sieve can't fix these.  if there are lists which don't do
proper checks to see if the confirmation checks are automatically
submitted, Sieve can't fix these either.

the vacation extension should leverage whatever mechanisms other RFCs
specify for recognising automatically submitted messages.  this includes
RFC 2919 (List-Id) and RFC 2369 (List-Help etc.), but not heuristics
like "if the local part of the sender address starts with 'owner-' or
ends in '-owner'".  making such heuristics standard is work for a
different group, IMHO.
-- 
Kjetil T.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 07:56:28 -0700 (PDT)

> yes, I don't think fixing the German judiciary system is practically

Or the American, for that matter. (Which one is more deeply broken is
a good topic for a bar-BOF...)

> submitted, Sieve can't fix these either.

Exactly. Additionally, we have a set of rules autoresponders are supposed
to follow; these are laid out in draft-moore-auto-email-response-05.txt.
This document was approved some time back as a proposed standard RFC; IMO
we need to make sure we're aligned with it (and reference it) but going
beyond it is unnecessary.

Auto-submitted is defined in this document, BTW.

> ends in '-owner'".  making such heuristics standard is work for a

draft-moore-auto-email-response-05.txt specifically allows such checks, both in
the form of sender and message content checks. I also note that vacation can be
combined with spamtest/virustest.

				Ned