Chain letter bounced (fwd)

L. McCarthy lmccarth at ducie.cs.umass.edu
Fri Jan 6 02:05:21 PST 1995


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A small advisory: since na166182 at anon.penet.fi is subscribed to the c'punks
list, and anon.penet.fi attempts to filter out instances of Make Money Fast,
any mention of "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" on the list will likely generate an autoreply
like the one below. It appears that a copy of the MAKE.MONEY.FAST FAQ (there,
I've said it again :) included in the autoreply will even trigger this 
mechanism, which is awfully ironic at best. At worst, this self-referential
property seems liable to allow some nasty email feedback loops. Offhand it
appears that a message with an address @anon.penet.fi (preferably forged) in
the From: line, and "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" as the message body, would launch an
automatic recursive bounce process as anon.penet.fi attempts to send itself
a message it considers illegal. Presumably this would crash when the disk
quota on some mail spool somewhere is exceeded. If the message was forged
to come From: cypherpunks at toad.com or another list to which an anon.penet.fi
user is subscribed, I imagine the list would have the dubious privilege of
witnessing all the recursive bounce messages along the way.

I'm not volunteering to try to write a better MMF-recognizer for a.p.f, 
though....

Forwarded message:
> From daemon at anon.penet.fi Fri Jan  6 04:22:39 1995
> To: lmccarth at ducie.cs.umass.edu
> Subject: Chain letter bounced
> 
> You, lmccarth at ducie.cs.umass.edu, have sent a message that seems to contain yet another
> copy of the infamous Make Money Fast chain letter.
> 
> If you want to make a complaint, please send just the headers of the
> message to admin at anon.penet.fi - albeit as the messages have been blocked
> (as you can see), the message probably *didn't* go through anon.penet.fi
> but was faked (using NNTP faking or something similar).
> 
[...]
> To: cypherpunks at toad.com
> From: "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth at ducie.cs.umass.edu>
[...]
> Posting letters asking for $$$ is of course a risky venture on Usenet. We
> see the PRZ Appeal as a Worthy Cause (tm), but that's just what all the
> MAKE.MONEY.FAST posters think of their garbage too. If you go sticking out
[...]

 -L. Futplex McCarthy

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