Philip Prindeville wrote:
Matt Kettler wrote:
Philip Prindeville wrote:
Matt Kettler wrote:
Philip Prindeville wrote:
Depends on whether you equate bare domains with URL's, I suppose.
If MUA's equate them with URLs, spammers will use this, and
SpamAssassin will use it.
There is only so much braindeath in UA's that you can bend the rules
for. Clearly, this involves breaking them.
Erm.. What rule does this actually break? Is there a rule in an RFC
somewhere specifying you MUST not interpret bare domains as URIs in
text emails?
There is an RFC that defines what a URL looks like. A bare domain
doesn't cut it.
Yes, but there's nowhere that says you can't interpret any text you want
as a URL.
RFCs in general are interpreted with "be strict about what you generate,
and liberal with what you accept". URLizing text segments fits with that
spirit, and it does not violate the letter of any RFC I'm aware of.
If you can prove otherwise, please do so.
You want to forbid bare domains in email? Go ahead. You can forbid
anything you like.
But don't call it a test for URL's, since it's clearly not.
Well, they don't.. they call it a test for URIs, which is actually
slightly different, but not really to the point here.
However, in general, it is intended to be a "test for anything most
MUA's will interpret as a URI".
Besides, when this "braindeath" is more the norm than the exception,
it's a de facto standard. Particularly in the absence of any rules
against it.
Yeah, I'll talk to the Outlook folks, and file a bug against
Thunderbird... (I think the latter only does it to be compatible with
the former...)
I'd venture to guess neither started it. Eudora predates both products
by quite an extensive period of time. It could have originated there, or
in Netscape mail.
Sorry, but I highly doubt you can blame this on microsoftism, nor do I
think it's any kind of wild incorrectness as you so strongly postulate.
This has been a very standard feature in email for a very long time.
It's not a recent development.
It's also a feature that is quite important to accuracy in spamassassin.
Spammers regularly take advantage of MUA's urlizing text. Regularly..
Every day. Adding the ability to detect those domains increases SA's hit
rate for spam, and that's a good thing. Yes, it causes SA to trigger on
spam reports, but it generally will do that for other parts of spam
messages anyway.
Let's face it, your problem isn't with SA detecting a spam domain, it's
with some idiot filter/rejecting their abuse box.
