From: Robert Spencer (roach.listgmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2008 - 11:34:56 CDT

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On 6/27/08, Jorey Bump <listjoreybump.com> wrote:
> Charles Marcus wrote, at 06/27/2008 10:44 AM:
>> On 6/27/2008, Robert Spencer (roach.listgmail.com) wrote:
>>> but I make up addresses on the fly and it's not convenient to list
>>> them all and all the addresses for that domain need to come to me
>>> anyway.
>>
>> Why not just use plus-addressing... this way you get the best of both
>> worlds (can 'make up addresses on the fly' *and* get proper recipient
>> validation)...
>
> Plussed addresses have caveats: Some sites have broken email address
> validation routines that won't accept them, and others will strip it
> when they send, anyway.

That sucks! But this all has made me rethink my naming scheme.

I original wanted unique names so that I could trace out who was
spamming me, I only ever had one real email address that was spammed
(the ftp site I used that address for published there logs on the
net). So there is not much tangible benefit to using unique names,
apart from making filtering slightly easier.

Unfortunately that benefit is grossly outwayed by the huge amount of
spam I received to non-existent email addresses and I mean huge, one
of the reasons I moved to my new server is that spamassassin's DB on
the old server grew to consume half of my file system quota (I
couldn't understand were all my free space until I did a backup on to
my desktop, cPanel doesn't show hidden files or folders in it's disk
use graph).

If I could figure out a way to slowly migrate away from my present
setup, I would. I'm thinking something like a username blacklist,
whitelist and queued list. I can't just grep my mail backups, as some
addresses have never received mail, e.g. password recovery addresses.

Another option is to grep my mail backups, add the addresses to my
user list and reroute all the remaining mail to my gmail account, but
don't I then run the risk of having my server blacklisted as a spam
relay?

>>>>>> Catchalls break recipient validation
>>
>>>>> they don't.
>>
>>>> They do for the SENDER... if they typo the address, they'll never
>>>> know.
>>
>>> that's not "recipient validation". that's something else...
>>
>> It is recipient validation *from the perspective of the sender*... so
>> its all in how you look at it...
>
> Senders aren't in a position to validate an address. Only the MX can do
> that. When we mention 'recipient validation' here, we're discussing the
> process used by the MX to determine legitimate recipient addresses for
> the domains it handles. Agreeing on a precise vocabulary is necessary in
> order to help others on this list.
>
> A sender might seek to verify an address, but as mouss says, that's
> something different. Sending a message to the wrong address doesn't make
> that address invalid.

Muscle memory can be a dangerous thing, I recently sent a test email
to my gmail.com account, but typed gmail.co.za instead. Needless to
say it didn't work.

--
Robert Spencer

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