From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 01 2000 - 15:19:28 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> I expect people will tend to include NNTP-Posting-Host as well for some
> time after the new header appears. The real question is whether or not
> the format I have proposed for Injector-Info lends itself to scanning
> for interesting things by filters. If so, then filters will soon be
> scanning for it, and NNTP-Posting-Host (which was never documented) will
> fade away.
The key factor for spam filters is that there needs to be some sort of
token that roughly corresponds to a "user" (it doesn't have to be
human-readable, but it does need to not change with every post and
preferrably identify one user or at least one dialup host), it needs to
always be called the same thing, and it needs to be easy to extract from
the line.
Right now, given the current draft, I'd do something like:
($user) = ($hdr{'Injector-Info'} =~ /\bposting-host=(\S+)/);
and just use the colon as part of the value since it doesn't change. If
whitespace is allowed around the equal sign, that can be dealt with
although it's annoying. Comments are right out. If we're going to allow
spaces in posting-host, then it should *always* be quoted so that the
parse can be easy; sometimes quoted and sometimes not quoted is much more
annoying to deal with.
It may be worthwhile calling the field something more generic, like
"identity", and just recommending the posting host be used as the default
value in the absence of something better.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>