email - I want to learn all about it!

[theread]

Hello,

Christmas must be on the way, I can tell by the doubling of spam emails to 'public' mailboxes on some charity web sites I look after. Grrrr and GRRRR AGAIN.

Although the web hosting company has a good blacklisting facility, many emails get through despite being on the blacklist, so I thought it was about time I learnt all about email and email headers. Obviously there are ways of creating return email addresses that fool blacklists.

So can anybody suggest a good book or magazine article on the subject?

Thanks very much

Roy

Continued....

Ok I have made a start, good old Wikipedia. Here is a quote from their article

"Also note that the "From:" field does not have to be the real sender of the email message. One reason is that it is very easy to fake the "From:" field and let a message seem to be from any mail address. "

Taking that into account it seems that what I really need to know is how to defeat these false sender addresses, which does not appear in the Wikipedia article so need external source of info

Any ideas?

Thanks

Roy

[SteveRiley]

Re: email - I want to learn all about it!

Lots of stuff. I'll throw out some terms to help jumpstart your research...

• SMTP. The protocol used to send e-mail between hosts.
• MTA. The software used to implement SMTP.
• MUA. The software used to collect, display, and manage e-mail.
• Envelope. The part of a message used by SMTP to route emails.
• Headers. The information added by MUAs and MTAs to describe message disposition and routes.

Note that an email can contain two "From:" bits, one in the header and one in the envelope. They do not have to be equivalent. (Hint.)

That should give you enough reading for the holiday...come back if you need more

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: email - I want to learn all about it!

Christmas must be on the way, I can tell by the doubling of spam emails to 'public' mailboxes on some charity web sites I look after. Grrrr and GRRRR AGAIN.

Are the e-mail addresses plainly visible on these web sites? Or have they been obfuscated in some way? If the sites currently have actual e-mail addresses visible, what about replacing those with forms visitors would fill out and submit? That plus using some verification method, such as Captcha, to prevent bots from submitting the form may at least help.

[theread]

Re: email - I want to learn all about it!

Hello to

First Steve

Thank you for the reading material and especially the hint. All very useful. I think I may need some industrial eye lotion though!

Second DoYou

Very sensible suggestions though not keen on Captcha as I think this has a very high overhead for the simple sites I look after. I did look at it in connection with a previous problem. I got round that one by using a PHP script that picked letters from a name on the page that had to be input into the form.

At the moment I am entering into this war of attrition with some interest, as I think I am learning from it. It seems to me that some of the messages are using GIF's rather than text as they seem like text to SMPT? Would I be correct in my assumption?

What really annoyed me was a allegedly reputable stationary supplier who, despite the 'no email' box being ticked kept sending marketing emails. I know it was possible to unsubscribe but I won on that one with a blacklisting after three goes. (They kept changing the send address but got it covered with a wild card *)

Thanks for your interest

Regards

Roy