Re: [tlug] Using autoresponse

[Sigurd Urdahl <sigurdur@??>]

Godwin Stewart wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:45:01 +0900, SM <somamedia@??> wrote:
>
>   
> > I been ask  to use mail - auto-response  to manage some kind of
> > campaign, the idea is to send an e-mail (empty) to an e-mail account
> > and the sender gets an immediate reply,
> >     
>
> The sender, or the person whose address was forged into the mail
> headers?
>
>   
I'd assume the latter, anything else would probably be quite tricky to 
implement, and prone to a lot of errors.
> As soon as the e-mail address used for this purpose is discovered or
> guessed by spammers, your system is going to be sending out the
> autoresponses to people who never asked for your prizes, or, worse
> still, information that they've been added to a list of some kind. That
> would be nothing but spam. Don't do it.
>   
Why would you assume that people/spammers/bots would send emails with 
forged headers to an address like this?

If the system accepts any emails, but drops the incoming email body and 
just sends a response back I don't see how it can be used to spam for 
anyone else than the system owner. If there is no affiliate program 
connected to this I can't see any sensible incentive for forging 
addresses onto the list at all, except for  pure vandalism.

This seems like twist on a quite normal way of building a list of email 
addresses, give people a chance of winning in exchange for some kind of 
personal information. Whether that is later used for legitimate purposes 
or spam is of course another question all together, but the technology 
used to collect the addresses can not be blamed for that.

kind regards,
-sig