RE: [Nms-cgi-devel] Questions regarding email filter...

[Wizard <wi...@ne...>]

> If I knew more about the existing wwwboard I could probably answer this
> one but where do these addresses come from ?

It isn't in the existing wwwboard (it was requested by users). This is new
for NMSBoard. They come from the post form, as you state below.

> I'm presuming they come from a user entering it via an html form in
> which case it would be laughably easy to get around.

That is actually one of three possible uses, another is to moderate posts
for certain emails/domains, and lastly to possibly block sending email
(later version, subscription email) to those addresses. This is in
combination with IP filtering. It is easy to get around if you're willing to
change you're email every time you're blocked from posting, and can post
from different IP ranges. Unless you are willing to retrieve numerous email
accounts from different domains, you won't get any email from your posts,
i.e., advertising posts. This was an issue for a friend of mine at Coonhound
Central, where people would post classifieds in the message board when they
should have been buying classifieds.

> That being so, perhaps we are over-engineering the filtering ?

That is entirely possible, but I'm just working off of how I think it should
work. If folks think that this need only be single email matching (string
match) then I'll be happy to do it that way. Did you get a chance to look at
the example code I sent out? That may help explain my motivation ;-).

> As far as I can see, the cases we need to deal with are:
>
> A specific email address
> Everyone at a specific domain
> Everyone at a domain and its subdomains
>
> The case you seem to be struggling with is
>
> Everyone at a domain containing a word somewhere in the hierarchy

Not really, but everyone in a WHOLE Domain, meaning everyone at
"JoeSchmoes", where "JoeSchmoes" may consist of:
cuba.joeschmoes.com       # not cuba.co.uk
joeschmoes.fi            # not joeschmoes.yahoo.co.uk
google.joeschmoes.com     # not google.com

> I just don't see that this would be a requirement for most people. If
> they want to ban aol.de and aol.co.uk then let them put both in the
> configuration. I actually think it would cause *less* confusion than odd
> edge cases falling through the filter.

Then it would probably be better to just do full ^-$ string matches on the
post-@ string, which isn't really what I hoped to accomplish. That may be
the only option, though. I'm not arguing that this may not be possible, but
if it is (reliably so) then I would love to include it.

> I believe that it is over-complicating things to try and develop a
> filter for something that is semantically richer than you can see just
> by looking at the domain name.

You may be correct, but it's just that I seem to be so close to what I am
trying to do with the code that I have. If at all possible it would be nice
to have it.

Thanks again,
Grant M.