On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 08:28:06AM -0400, John Peacock wrote: > >i.e. nothing in the DATA section whatsoever. This isn't "legitimate > >mail" in any sense whatsoever (since there's no mail there, only an > >envelope). It's completely illegitimate. It violates RFC 2822. It > >communicates nothing. > > Except that ezmlm _will_ accept that envelope-only message to > administrative addresses (like a moderate reply). So, technically > speaking, the envelope alone contains enough information for at least one > purpose, hence shouldn't be blocked outright without recourse, which is why > I agree with Michael that this belongs in a plugin. And the slightly > amended check_basicheaders I added to CVS does exactly this.
Empty mail does communicate two things -- sender and recipient. Either of those two, usually the recipient, can be significant. Mailing list confirmations come to mind; so do the confirmation addresses used by pseudonymous remailers, where the final stage in nym creation is to cause something to be sent to an unpredictable challenge address ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) sent only to the nym creator. At the same time, zero-length messages have about the same communicative value to spammers. I've seen and been irritated by them too, but there wasn't any pitch, just an email address which itself wasn't meaningful. The only usefulness I can anticipate for spammers is if they were to try to pitch a website whose hostname appeared in the sender address or something, which seems awfully low-percentage, even for them. But that itself seems orthogonal to the issue of accepting empty messages, since they can try to advertise in envelope sender addresses today, whether with empty mail or not. -- Devin \ aqua(at)devin.com, IRC:Requiem; http://www.devin.com Carraway \ 1024D/E9ABFCD2: 13E7 199E DD1E 65F0 8905 2E43 5395 CA0D E9AB FCD2
