From: J.B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Wed Mar 14 2001 - 18:43:32 CST
On 3/14/01 5:11 PM, Kent Landfield at <kent@landfield.com> wrote:
-snip harvesters not being total idiots-
> If you added invalid to get kent@landfield.com.invalid the only thing you are
> really accomplishing is that you are stoping the readership from being able to
> reply to a poster directly. That is unless you expect newreaders to be
> modified to automatically strip the .invalid. If so then whats the point ?
The point isn't to add ".invalid" to a legitimate address in order to make
it undeliverable, the point is to add ".invalid" to an *already*
undeliverable address.
As for what you can do with this -- newsreaders can warn users about or
refuse to send email to such addresses; preventing both annoyances to the
hapless sender and wasted bandwidth.
Other forms of munging are unclear -- both to the user and to his software,
you don't know if "nospam+user@isp.com" or even "user@isp.comnospam" is
actually deliverable or not, and if it's not today, you can't promise the
same thing for tomorrow. You can with "nospam@fake.invalid".
As for the bit about the absence of ".invalid" evidence of malicious intent,
that's certainly overstating the case today, but possibly not in the future:
not using ".invalid" means that the person is using an address to which they
have no right, when they could use an address to which they *are* entitled
to use to achieve the same end. If they are aware of the existence of the
".invalid" tld and it's purpose, then the use of an address they aren't
entitled to at the least carries the implication that they want people (and
not just harvesters) to believe they are entitled to use it.
-- J.B. Moreno