From: Bill Davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 10:37:59 CDT
On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Henry Spencer wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > > think we can just ask them all to turn this off (if they haven't already,
> > > which they probably have since this used to be a huge spam relaying hole).
> >
> > Exactly why it won't be turned off. It is recognized as an attempt to
> > relay and the mail is rejected.
>
> The same effect will be had if you simply treat the % as an ordinary
> character, i.e. by completely turning off any special interpretation,
> since there will be no such mailbox.
>
> > At least at a few of the major ISPs I tried to access.
>
> The major ISPs are not relevant, unless one of the moderator-proxy sites
> happens to be behind one of them. (The moderator's own site is not, I
> believe, relevant -- only the proxy sites, the ones which accept mail to,
> e.g. sci-space-tech and forward it to the sci.space.tech moderator, will
> ever see the % addresses.)
The people who use major ISPs might not feel the same way about it. If
the mailers on the news machines are set to reject relay I don't believe
they will post to moderated groups using forwarding conventions, or
anything which looks like a forwarding convention.
Most sites, not only ISPs, are wary of doing anything which might look as if
they let mail out which the recipient site might then relay. After a
quick check I can say that AIX, Linux, and Solaris all come with "!" and
"%" configured as significant characters. Do you *really* want to try to
convince every site that they should reconfigure sendmail?
Technically it works. I don't think it works in the real world, it would
lead to a slow conversion at best. Of course some people are violently
against allowing non-ASCII in news anyway, I'm sure they think it's a
great idea, so they can later note that it isn't working well.
-- -bill davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com) "The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the last possible moment - but no longer" -me