bagginsbill opened this issue on Nov 01, 2007 · 27 posts
bagginsbill posted Fri, 02 November 2007 at 11:47 AM
Thanks Annie.
Hey on this issue that's been raised about getting spam to an address that isn't yours...
This is very simple. I am very familiar with the SMTP protocol that handles internet mail. There is a very silly thing in that protocol. The "TO:" field that you see in your message has NOTHING whatsover to do with who the mail was sent to. That is just informational. This is because the message header is supposed to show the target recipients as a virtual entry and can be a nickname or the name of a mailing list or anything you like. There is a separate field, which you can only see if you look into the full exchange going on behind the scenes, that has the real address that the message was addressed to.
Have you ever seen received a message that was "To: All Employees" or "To: Soccer Moms" or whatever? That's not your name, right? Your real user name was exchanged behind the scenes. When somebody mails to a list, everybody on the list gets an individual copy but they all say "To: Admins" or "To: Sales".
The same is true of the "From:" field. The sender gets to put anything they want in there. If you reply, that's not where you reply to. There is a hidden field that actually controls where your reply goes. So you'll see "From: Town Council" or some such, but if you reply it really goes to an individual.
It is merely a convention, and not a required one, that the true From and To fields are actually displayed in your message.
I myself, once discovered the true identity of a spammer, because he was an idiot and was unclear how to hide his identity in the headers. So I knew his real address. I then sent him (through software I wrote) 10,000 messages with fictitious from and to fields so he wouldn't be able to sort and select and delete them. Every message was different, with a different subject, and a different body, all generated by software with real English sentences, no two alike. That was a delicious moment. I also signed him up for a couple dozen Penis enlargement newsletters.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)