Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] Re: ISP listing for nms formmail

[Nicholas C. <ni...@un...>]

> On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 04:47:59PM +0000, David Simmons - EliteUKServe.Net (dav...@el...) wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > A suggestion:
> > 
> > It would be nice to send a 400 type error to the screen when the script 
> > rejects a user's/bot's post? Otherwise the scripts that these spammers are 
> > using are still sending GETs & POSTs as they are getting a 200 returned. This 
> > obviously uses more of the ISP's and most likely customer's bandwidth usage.

I confess I'm only a lurker on the developers' list who hasn't even
installed the NMS scripts, let alone developed on them, so I'm guessing that
the fail screen displays some sort of useful message to the user about why
their message was rejected, and that this can be down to a genuine mistake
that they have to fix. Presumably this page is currently sent as "200 OK"

What happens on Microsoft Internet Explorer if you send this page out with a
400 series error code? Does IE substitute one of its "helpful" error pages?
[eg the "maybe you typed the URL wrong" page, the one that is so $expletive
useful, as it comes up for DNS failure and file not found on the server]

If so, this doesn't rule this idea out, but maybe it would have to be done
based on user agent. Either by negative filtering (do it unless they say
they're IE) or positive filtering (do it only if they provide a user agent
and we know it's not IE)

Do spambots typically set user agent strings?

Nicholas Clark