At 00:13 2005-04-07 -0700, Jeff Chan wrote:
On Wednesday, April 6, 2005, 11:58:31 PM, Nick Askew wrote:
Jeff,
So it seems that there is an obvious loophole in SURBL. As long as the spammer uses a legitimate business running a redirector you will never
black
list them (perhaps the spammer could even set up their own legitimate redirector). This open redirector discussion for ZDNET has been open for several weeks now, they have had more than ample warning.
Nick
No, it's not a loophole. Programs like SpamAssassin and SpamCopURI correctly parse some redirection sites like g.msn.com and check the redirected-to site.
That workaround is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
If we encourage client implementations to work around the problem in that way, we will always have:
1. Clients that need to be updated with the latest redirectors, unless we provide and encourage implementations to use a constantly updated online source of redirectors.
2. Major redirectors getting included in the special work-arounds, like Google, and smaller ones not getting included.
If we believe that open redirectors are bad, we should not solve the problem by working around a few major ones that we are currently aware of.
Patrik