Comments on: Email Blacklisting Considered Harmful.

By: Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:39:54 +0000

I finally solved at least the sending-mail-via-shared-server part of this problem like this:

http://viewvc.red-bean.com/kfogel?view=revision&revision=3310

Not ideal, needless to say .

By: Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel — Thu, 27 May 2010 02:23:54 +0000

Agreed. Not necessarily a secure channel, just an authenticated one. The authentication scheme can be pretty trivial, as it doesn’t take much to raise the cost of doing business (per email) to something beyond what a spammer would be willing to pay.

Speaking of spam prevention: my reCaptcha for this comment is “emergency flavors”. Oh yeah, gotta get me some o’ those…

By: dave glasser

dave glasser — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:26:55 +0000

Yeah, it really seems that there needs to be an authenticated channel between domain-on-shared-server and gmail (or whatever) to make this work.

By: Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:02:44 +0000

The whole point is that Innocent Victim wants to use the spam filters offered by the service she forwards to, though. She just doesn’t want all the domains on her shared server penalized because she receives a lot of spam.

I don’t think “blindly propagating mail across the net” is an accurate description of what’s going on at all. When I forward mail to a service, I know exactly what I am doing and where the mail is going. No normal user would ever think of themselves as behaving irresponsibly when they auto-forward emails from one address to another… nor should they have to.

By: dave glasser

dave glasser — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:45:57 +0000

Well, one answer is that innocentvictim@domain-on-shared-server.com should be running its own spam filter before blindly propagating mail across the net.