From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Jun 06 2002 - 06:51:29 CDT
In <Pine.LNX.4.10.10206051011070.24633-100000@spock.peak.org> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
>> How so? The draft does not define "address",
>The draft is written in English (or english, for those who wish to whine
>about spelling or capitalization).
>>... a distinction between an "address" and a "valid address".
>So, tell me, for whom is "joe@bite.me.you.damn.spammers" an address? It's
>not an address. It goes nowhere. And your point is still moot because the
>reader isn't necessarily going to make the nit-picky distinction you want
>him to, he's going to see "address" and assume it has the standard meaning
>of "email address for someone". He isn't going to look at
>8#*!3@f.jg3.852.jfdksa and say "that's an address", he's going to call it
>line noise.
Actually, an "address" is defined as a syntactic object in RFC 2822, and
the definition is repeated, for convenience, in the Collected Syntax
appendix of our draft.
Some addresses, such as "joe@bite.me.you.damn.spammers", are stupid,
unusable, wasteful, mungeful, or even "invalid", according to what
terminology you prefer.
>No, sir, silently circumventing the user's explicit action is wrong, and
>should be clearly identified as such in this draft. Don't be confused into
>thinking that this means that every injector must accept every article
>that obeys the format defined in this draft; I'm sure that you don't need
>reminding that injectors may reject articles based on any policy the site
>wants to implement, even one as ludicrous as "you must use a spammable
>address in every article you post so our mail servers can be beaten even
>further into the ground processing the resulting spam". But site policy is
>not what this draft deals with, it deals with formats and definitions of
>headers. Sites do not get to play with those willy-nilly. Prohibitng the
>misuse of the Sender header, and a deliberate circumvention of a formally
>defined From header content, is well within the scope of this standard.
Our standard could indeed have provided an explict MUST NOT for this case,
but we discussed it ad nauseam, and the Rough Consensus was that we did
not wish to go that far, but that we would apply some discouragement,
especially in the case of Sender. So that is what we did. It is up to the
injecting agent (i.e. the ISP usually). If you don't like his policy, then
don't post your news through him.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5