--- Begin Message ---
- To: John <summer@computerdatasafe.com.au>
- Cc: Frank Carmickle <frankiec@braille.uwo.ca>
- Subject: Re: ASK is broken
- From: Marco Paganini <paganini@paganini.net>
- Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 01:36:25 -0400
- Message-id: <magnus-1093756978@paganini.net>
- In-reply-to: <413163C5.6010101@computerdatasafe.com.au>
- References: <41308BA7.1000602@ComputerDatasafe.com.au> <magnus-1093739805@paganini.net> <413132BA.9040005@computerdatasafe.com.au> <magnus-1093750392@paganini.net> <413163C5.6010101@computerdatasafe.com.au>
Hi John,
Now it seems clear to me what happened.
As I said, ASK knows how to avoid mail-loops with the challenges. If a number
of emails is received from the same sender in a given amount of time, ASK
will refuse to send further challenges to that address in a while. This is in
place and works pretty well.
ASK also has the concepts of "lists". It works with a "whitelist" a
"blacklist" and an "ignorelist". The difference between black and ignore is
that black will send back an email saying "Please stop sending me emails".
It looks like Frank got some spam coming from the list and added the list
address to his blacklist without getting out of the list first. This caused
the nastygram sent by his blacklist to cycle over and over, causing the
problem.
I have to admit I never conceived this possibility. The blacklist is to
be used sparingly and very cautiously. In any case, I'll be removing
this feature from ASK for the future versions. I think ignoring spam is
good enough.
Hopefully Frank will read this email and remove the list address from
his blacklist.
Please distribute my apologies to the people on the list. I'll make sure this
feature gets removed from ASK.
Regards,
Paga
On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 01:04:05PM +0800, John wrote:
> Marco Paganini wrote:
> >Hi John,
> >
> >
> >>How many would you like? I've got 500 in my trash folder maked "unread"
> >>so they're easy to find. Those are the ones that arrived after I cleaned
> >>out the first batch and read legitimate email.
> >
> >
> >Can you send me some 10 or 20 of them? I need to see why this is
> >happening.
> >
>
> 40?
--
Marco Paganini | UNIX / Linux / Networking
paganini@paganini.net | PGP: http://www.paganini.net/pgp/
http://www.paganini.net | Magnus Frater te spectat...
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