Will New Sendmail Block Remailers?

[William H. Geiger III]

In <Pine.LNX.3.95.980317085417.19255A-100000 at geek.net>, on 03/17/98 
   at 08:58 AM, "Robert A. Hayden" <rhayden at means.net> said:

>On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, John Young wrote:

>> Markoff in the NYT reports today on the release of a new 
>> Sendmail upgrade by author Eric Allman that will block 
>> spam by checking the legitimacy of the originating address 
>> before delivery.
>> 
>> The report claims that spam is up to 10% of e-mail worldwide,
>> And that Sendmail is used on 75% of the computers that route 
>> e-mail, all of which are being fitted with the new program.
>> 
>> What are the chances that this will affect remailers or other 
>> means of eternal anonymity?

>Depends on how the remailer is set up.

>For example, I own the domain "geek.net".  If I set up a remailer and
>messages resolve to "anonymous at geek.net", I suspect it will get through. 
>I may need to also have an alias that /dev/nulls messages to
>anonymous at geek.net, but that is still a legitimate mailing address. 

>I think what they are trying to stop are spammers that have a return
>address like "fakename at fakedomain.com" or "your at best.friend".  Those
>wouldn't resolve and would just get shitcanned.

>IMHO, there's nothing _toooo_ sinister here, yet.  But vigilance is
>suggested.

Well I think this may add to the problem. All the spamers need to do is
start faking real e-mail addresses in the headers. So now you will have
alot of users bearing the brunt of anti-spam attacks and complaints who
had nothing to do with it.

-- 
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