Pasting in From:

Bill Stewart stewarts at ix.netcom.com
Sun Nov 30 20:38:13 PST 1997



>> : So, I propose a compromise: What if I enable pasting of From:,
>> : but if a From: header is pasted in, a short disclaimer is a
>> : added to the beginning of the body of the message.
>> : Would that mess anyone up? I think this would be
>> : sufficient to avoid most problems with "forging".

News and email are two separate cases.  For news, there's almost no reason
for a poster who wants his real name and address in a message to use
an anonymous remailer; maybe something like posting with your Juno email
on the message rather than your work email.  But you can put your
real email address in the message body if you want to do that,
so not having that feature in a remailer is no restriction on 
the legitimate user.  There are lots of reasons to forge someone else's name :-)
So if the remailers don't support From: pasting, it's no loss.
Similarly, for Reply-To: and Sender: and Path: and Received:
and maybe a few other occasionally-forged header fields.

Adding a disclaimer to the beginning of the message is no problem;
adding it to the headers is useless, since almost nobody reads them,
especially the kind of shoot-from-the-hip flamers you want to avoid.

For email, perhaps you don't want the address to be visible during
the first few hops in an encrypted remailer path, but you do still 
want one of your addresses to be there for the recipient.
Again, you can put it in the message body yourself.
There's a little less risk of pasting in headers on mail to individuals,
but forged mail to mailing lists and mail2news relays is still a problem,
and you definitely can't expect remailers to recognize mailing lists.
There are also minor problems, like forging the From: address on mail
to president at whitehouse.gov, which are better avoided this way
even if you do also add disclaimers.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts at ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639







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