From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 12:11:11 CST
On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 01:59:05PM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> In <ylitnoc92x.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
writes:
>
>
> >Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>
> >> NOTE: The use of ".invalid" is to provide an aid to mail systems so that
> >> addresses deliberately intended to be malformed can be identified and
> >> delivery aborted. User agents MUST identify such addresses and require
> >> the user to alter the address when attempting a personal email reply.
> >> Injecting agents that have authentication information MAY choose to
> >> enforce the From-content based on the poster's authenticated identity.
>
> >I don't think putting conformance requirements in a note is a good idea,
> >and furthermore this is an interface issue. s/MUST/Ought/. No
> >interoperability problem is created by not treading .invalid specially.
>
> Noted. Other opinions?
There is an interoperability problem if a user puts an email into a message
which is unreplyable and does not indicate it. That's false data, and
will cause the user agent to issue replies to that email address which
will generate a bounce error. (And waste the sender's time.)
You should not put false information into an article indicating you have
a replyable address when you don't.
>
>
> There is currently no wording to say that the Injector-Info header SHOULD
> be present (though we might add such wording). Certainly the matter
> SHOULD be covered one way or the other (which is what it says). I was a
> little doubtful about the last part of that sentence when I wrote it, but
> did not want to provoke Brad unnecessarily :-( .
>
> I shoould like to hear some further opinions.
Injector info remains a redundant header. The path line contains the
injector's identity and the tail entry after it is the appropriate place
for (non-identifying) material on the poster's identity. It is a
violation of important privacy principles to put truly identifying
information into the header such as an IP address or email userid.
Sites may decide they wish to violate their user's privacy rights and
that is between them and their users. But for an IETF standard to
in any way demand or encourage it is unacceptable.
The standard can say that a *token* may be placed in the article by the
injector which can be used by the local administrators to identify
the actual poster for discipline. It should not be possible to map the
token back to the user by other parties. It is acceptable if there is
a way to email the person using this token (ie. the token can be an alias
on a remailer for example.)
The token should however, be the same for each posting by the same user,
so that people can use it to block people and stop spammers.
This is not an idle issue. There are a lot of newgroups on the net where
people want to post without revealing their identity. For example there
are alt.support.* groups for medical problems. People want to post there but
don't wish to have it tied back to them. However, if they have a fixed
IP address (as I do), they can't post directly with a different from line
because their fixed IP address is put in by many injector programs acting
without concern for the privacy of users.
If this standard puts in anything requiring or encouraging a header
similar to nntp-posting-host (or injector-info doing the same thing) the
EFF will probably lodge a protest against it.