At 7:09 PM +1000 8/30/01, Terry Allen imposed structure on a stream
of electrons, yielding:
>>Hello,
>>
>>On Wed, Aug 29, 2001, 17:17:02 GMT
>> Pete Stephenson, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Is there any maximum size limit in the banner? (I have no intention
>>>of writing a novel, but I'd like to avoid breaking stuff in the
>>>aforementioned manner.)
>>
>>255 bytes - the limit for a string in an STR# resource.
>>
>Hi again,
> Excuse my ignorance, but this talk of UCE banner's grabbed my
>curiosity. Just what is a UCE banner? does it mean 'Unsolicited Commercial
>Email'?
> Does adding this NO UCE banner prevent the (correctly formatted)
>spam sender's mail coming into the server? If this is the case, it would
>seem a very useful modification to make.
The server's 'banner' is the line it sends at initial connect time.
Until the client side sees the banner, it is not supposed to send any
commands. Technically only the initial 3-digit response code part of
the banner is meaningful, but traditionally the remainder has
included things like MTA name and version and hostname.
A very popular idea for drawing a middle line between outright
banning of UCE and doing nothing in law has been to define a standard
way for server owners to state their policy to anyone who wishes to
offer mail to their machine. The banner is the logical way to do this
and at least one of the failed federal bills in the US has included
language that would have made "NO UCE" in a banner the electronic
equivalent of "No Trespassing" signs on private property. (In the US,
property without fences or such signs is open to rather extensive use
by anyone, but with prohibitive signs trespassing, hunting, camping,
etc. become criminal offenses) A law that established this (or more
likely, one which left the technical details to someone like the
IETF, wehich would likely adopt a banner standard) would be hard to
fight politically in the US because it is a clear endorsement of
private property rights which would be exercisable in an open and
transparent fashion. The spammers and their fellow-travelers really
hate the idea with a passion and have worked every political trick
they can find to smother any bill that comes close to this, even
though it is far from what many in the anti-spam community would
prefer: an outright ban on all UCE.
So far, adding special language to a banner probably has little or no
impact. Spammers do not have to honor it and so they don't bother
checking. If they were smart, they would be checking now because it
would at least help them avoid places where the owners of servers are
announcing their enmity.
--
Bill Cole
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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