Mini-mailbombs and Warning Letters
(This is not about MIME, but the astute reader will see some parallels...) I've received a couple of "automatically generated" pieces of e-amil which tell me that, in the generator's opinion, something is wrong with my public key, or it could not be found at the keyserver preferred by the owner of the mail generator, etc. Quoting from the latest: (identity of generator owner witheld) "P.S. This mail was composed by my mailreading sftwr, which automatically scans incoming mail, looking for failed keyserver requests, and prompts me whether it should automatically send this msg on my behalf. If there is a bug w this sftwr (for example, you never PGP sign your msgs, so this entire msg makes no sense), or if you're interested in the software itself (mail-secure.el: a package in lisp for emacs; this is just one of the many crypto/privacy related things it does) please mail the author of this package ( tjic@openmarket.com ) for details." As the saying goes, "Sigh." Being on a list with 700 subscribers, some of whom are running increasingly sophisticated automatic checking agents, I foresee an increase in these "warning letters" from their checking agents who feel posts are not adequate in some way. A minor issue, but symptomatic of trends. I'm dealing with it the same way I'm dealing with the few people who have something in their MIME setup that triggers my mailer (Eudora Pro 2.1) to treat their text as attachments. Namely, by filtering them out. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
I'm dealing with it the same way I'm dealing with the few people who have something in their MIME setup that triggers my mailer (Eudora Pro 2.1) to treat their text as attachments. Namely, by filtering them out.
Because there were two complaints on this, I'd like to find out why. I'm using a modified version of Elm, Michael Elkins' 2.4PL24ME4 version. Among other features, this adds integrated PGP support, and uses the content-type application/pgp for it. Here is the complete header on the message I sent, as returned: : From owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Sun Sep 17 23:26:25 1995 : Return-Path: <owner-cypherpunks@toad.com> : Received: from relay3.UU.NET by yage.tembel.org with smtp : (Smail3.1.29.1 #9) id m0suQWm-000HZ2a; Sun, 17 Sep 95 16:41 EDT : Received: from toad.com by relay3.UU.NET with SMTP : id QQzhpy19217; Sun, 17 Sep 1995 16:30:47 -0400 : Received: by toad.com id AA23554; Sun, 17 Sep 95 13:28:04 PDT : Received: from yage.tembel.org by toad.com id AA23543; Sun, 17 Sep 95 13:27:55 PDT : Received: by yage.tembel.org (Smail3.1.29.1 #9) : id m0suQJV-000HYvC; Sun, 17 Sep 95 20:27 GMT : Message-Id: <m0suQJV-000HYvC@yage.tembel.org> : From: shields@tembel.org (Michael Shields) : Subject: cypherpunks as a newsgroup : To: cypherpunks@toad.com : Date: Sun, 17 Sep 1995 20:27:43 +0000 (GMT) : X-Dogma: Microsoft is not the answer. : Microsoft is the question. : No is the answer. : Mime-Version: 1.0 : Content-Type: application/pgp : Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit : Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com : Precedence: bulk : Content-Length: 1092 I think that it must be the content-type that is causing problems, as the rest of the message is completely standard. To the people whose mailers broke out in hives at that message: Do you get the same behavior with any message having an unknown content-type? -- Shields.
participants (2)
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shields@tembel.org -
tcmay@got.net