[Pan-users] Re: RE: Access provider, email provider, and Pan

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Fri, 16
Jun 2006 14:58:53 -0400:

> On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:44:34 -0700, Travis wrote:
> 
>>> So if I were to abandon that address, would Pan be able to use some
>>> other in some way?? Or would I have to find another newsfeed provider??
>> 
>> I have to use my userId and password to access my news server and I put
>> that info in the "News Servers" and I put an invalid address in "Posting
>> Profiles" and it works and I don't get any spam from my newsgroup posts.
> 
> Hmmm .... And that works?? IOW, Pan requires *something*, but it doesn't
> have to be valid? Hmmm ... I suppose I could then put a transparently
> munged one in my .sig ....

Yes.  The only newsgroups I use a valid address on are the gmane ones,
which are actually mailing lists.  Everything else I use something like
cox.reply2group.net.please as the domain name, with instructions for
unmunging it, of course.

Note that when choosing a munged address, you want two things.  First,
make sure it's not your real domain -- munge the domain not just the
username portion.  If you use your normal domain, you are just causing
them to get more spam they have to process, whether it's for a valid
address or not.

Second, make sure it's not a valid domain at all, so you aren't causing
someone else to get spam.  reply2group.net might be such a valid domain,
thus the "please" at the end.  "please" isn't a valid TLD (top level
domain), so any direct spammer harvesting isn't going to end up hurting
whoever might have reply2group.net as their domain.

Here, I actually use a dedicated address for my (non-gmane) news address
as well.  Since nothing but personal replies to news posts legitimately
come to it, I can do additional filtering as well.  Specifically, I
instruct people to put " -news" at the end of the subject line -- that is,
"Subject line here -news".  Anything without the specific sequence
space-dash-news-END as part of the subject line gets filtered out as spam.
Again, I can do this because the /only/ messages that the address gets
legitimately are in reply to news posts, and I have instructions in my sig
detailing the keyword rules so anyone wishing to use them can do so.  I've
had absolutely ZERO spam get thru the keyword filter, because the
spammmers don't bother figuring that out, and even if they did, they'd
have to set up a special rule for my mail and that's not worth it to them.

Do note, however, that while PAN doesn't enforce valid addresses, your
news server might.  Few do, because of the spam problem and because most
users have munged addresses as a result, but there may be a few that
actually validate the address and won't post the post unless it's valid
(or more likely, their own domain, thus, Adelphia MAY require a whatever at
adelphia address, whether valid or not, to post).  Again, that's not
likely, but if you run into it not working, it's possible that's why.



-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman