Re: [courier-users] couriermlm and SPF issue

[Sam V. <mr...@co...>]

Alessandro Vesely writes:

> Ricardo Kleemann wrote:
>>> Furthermore, Qmail's ezmlm does the same thing, as I said, and it
>>> predates Courier by some years. And I've seen other mailing list
>>> managers that also number their list messages. This is standard,
>>> reasonable practice, and I see no reason to change it just 
>>> because there are, perhaps, more dumb people on the Internet, 
>>> now.
> 
> I beg your pardon, but I must have missed a few of episodes of this
> threads. The topic apparently shifted from SPF refusal to challenging
> the author. Is the latter a request to confirm sending by visiting a
> web page or something similar?

Yes. You see, some people are just too busy to waste time on deleting spam 
from their Royal Highness's mailbox. So they have an autoresponder reply to 
every message, demanding that the sender either click on a link, or reply 
with a keyword, or something along these lines, before the original message 
graces the eyes of the Royal Highness.

Of course, when a spam run forges someone's return address, they get flooded 
with all the confirmation requests, from these obnoxious twits, which in 
many cases include copies of the original spam.

And, it seems, some ISPs offer this idiocy to their customers as a 
"feature".

> What does it mean "number their list messages"? (VERP?)

couriermlm has a counter that numbers list messages, which is a part of the 
return address, so it tracks which list messages were bounced by who, and, 
eventually, sends a message to the subscriber listing all the messages they, 
apparently, missed, together with the instructions on how to redeliver them.

>> This number one ISP has this "antispam" feature which is adopted by
>> many of their users, thus why the problem is encountered.
> 
> And doesn't the ISP provide for working around such feature? Can't 
> they offer any "forwarding agreement"?

These kinds of ISPs are remarkably resistent to clues, and need to simply be 
blacklisted until they grow one.