IPP Mail Archive: RE: IPP> How to prevent spam in email noti

RE: IPP> How to prevent spam in email notifications?

From: Paul Moore (pmoore@peerless.com)
Date: Thu May 04 2000 - 12:06:20 EDT

  • Next message: Carl-Uno Manros: "RE: IPP> How to prevent spam in email notifications?"

    "Nobody is going to do that job for us. We have to list the possible threats
    and then describe how we created a design which can protect against those
    threats if not in perfect, but at least a reasonably good way. I have only
    tried to sound out our Area Director how far he thinks we need to go."

    I am not asking some third party to do anything - I am asking YOU to state what
    one concrete issue is and then we can solve it. Spamming in general is a problem
    of mail systems not of mail clients - the fact that SMTP is very loose about
    what it will let through for example.

    You do raise one potential problem that I think is valid. UserA can subscribe
    UserB (or even DListC) to the page printed event of a printer. UserA has now
    enrolled the printer as a spamming machine. I propose the following potential
    solutions.

    1. This is why email generalized notifications is a Bad Thing and we should
    limit the set of email subscribable things to errors, job start and job complete
    (that still cold be a lot of traffic - but it would be an order of magnitude
    less)

    2. The ability to email subscribe on behalf of somebody else is an administrator
    only operation.

    3. Do nothing - the person will get fired because their actions are traceable
    (In the same way that we cant protect the printer against somebody pouring
    coffee into it or sending us a job that contains 1,000,000 page feeds)

    I think we should seriously consider #2 - its simple to implement and seems to
    be a reaonable compromise. A given implementation can always turn the
    restriction on or off.



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