Totalkly OT: How do I stop SPAM

[Bob Eager]

Well, this old fart here had his mind first focused on it in the early

1980s, when the powers that be in the UK academic establishment decided to reinvent the wheel with email. Anyone remember the insistence that domain names in email addresses shuld be written the 'other' way? The infamous Grey Book....

[Andy Hall]

Absolutely.

It wasn't just that, though was it? They were also titting around with connection based network protocols and other areas. IIRC there was a whole series of documents called the Coloured Books, and UK academia was trying to get U.S. vendors to implement them. I don't think that anybody ever did, and so the whole thing pretty much died a death.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[stefek.zaba]

Oh yes, uk.ac.ic lives on un (unreliable?) memory, along with a fashion for Pascal-style identifiers trotting out the instution's entire charter as part of the name -

uk.academic.manchester-john-rylands-university

or some such. Or am I just imagining this?

[Andy Hall]

No, it was like that, and IIRC there was influence one way or the other or both with X.400 addressing as well - i.e. ridiculously large and meaningless addressing serving no useful purpose.

I suppose it lives on in Active Directory in a sense.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[Bob Eager]

That's right. Yellow book for transport service, green book for terminal protocols, red book for remote job entry, blue book for file transfer. The blue book was the bane of my life...a dreadful thing.

I remember going to a Grey Book committee meeting attended by all major mail implementors at that time. They ALL said they wanted to use the standard domain name ordering, but 'they' (powers that be) had really already decided to reverse it as it was 'easier for implementors'.

[Bob Eager]

No, it really happened. I remember some mail systems getting very confused and managing to parse a domain name so badly that it became undeliverable - by palindromising (there's a good word) it...e.g. uk.ac.ic.ac.uk !!

[Andrew Gabriel]

OK, my attempt to not followup this OT thread has failed...

I thought I'd dig out my copy of the Jim Crammond Farewell message, complete with it's grey book mail headers for those who were around at the time to drool over the NRS names and the Via: header ;-)

Via: UK.AC.UKNET-RELAY; Fri, 3 Apr 92 17:03 (V35.3 at UK.CO.GPT.DATA-SYSTEMS.D7) Received:from newcastle.ac.uk by eros.uknet.ac.uk via JANET with NIFTP (PP) id ; Fri, 3 Apr 1992 16:57:23 +0100 Received:from uk.ac.uknet by ncl.ac.uk; Fri, 3 Apr 92 16:55:38 +0100 Received:from localhost by eros.uknet.ac.uk with SMTP (PP) id ; Fri, 3 Apr 1992 16:44:04 +0100 To: [e-mail] Subject: The Jim Crammond Farewell message From: Peter Houlder Address: Computing Lab, Univ of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK. Phone: [phone] x7568 Fax: [phone] (G3) Date: Fri, 03 Apr 92 16:43:41 +0100 Message-Id: Original-Sender: [e-mail] Original-Sender: [e-mail] Reply-To:Peter Houlder Sender: [e-mail]

Someone asked me if I still had a copy of this. I did and I thought it might just raise a smile on those who haven't seen it.

#########################################################################

Please stop complaining about the mail system. It works for us, and we use it more than you do. If there are some features you think might be missing, if the system isn't as simple to use as you think it should be, TOUGH! Go back to writing letters, we don't need you. See Figure 1.

--------------------------------- ! _ ! ! { } ! ! | | ! ! | | ! ! .-.! !.-. ! ! .-! ! ! !.-. ! ! ! ! ! ; ! ! \ ; ! ! \ ; ! ! ! : ! ! ! | ! ! | | ! ! ! !_______________________________! Figure 1.

Forget about your silly problem, let's take a look at some of the features of our mail system:

1) Address Syntax. We can understand lots of address formats. We take them in and turn them around a few times until we have something suitable for sending out. Mixed syntax addresses get unmixed. We think it's great. So, you don't want your addresses turned around? You actually want to use mixed addresses? Too bad. You shouldn't need to anyway. See Figure 1. 2) NRS addresses. In the UK our domain addresses are the "other way round" (like the way we drive on the left). But our mailer will take your address in either order and figure out which way round it should be. So mail to your Computer Science Dept. sometimes goes to Czechoslovakia instead. Tough. Get Czechoslovakia to change its name. Anyway, we told the JNT about the domain ordering problem a long time ago. They said "See Figure 1". 3) Host Hiding. Works just fine. All these machines look like one mail host, and we have tables set up so mail coming in from anywhere is sent to the machine with your mailbox on it. You can't access that machine? Too bad. You can even try redirecting mail to another machine. Of course, if its a machine we control we'll probably send it right back again. Tough. See Figure 1. 4) Tailored Delivery. We can do it. You can get a vacation program to automatically reply to people who send you mail when you are away. Then their vacation programs can reply to your vacation program. And your vacation program can reply to their replies. But don't think you can get away with all this junk mail for long, because we can hit you with ... 5) Authorisation. We can stop sites sending mail or receiving mail through our system. We can even pick on individual users. Oh, you mean you can't send mail to us any more. Tough, we didn't want your complaints anyway. See Figure 1. 6) Error messages. If you don't understand them, ignore them. Why give yourself an ulcer? Try sending your message again, or else use the phone instead. Don't waste time mailing us about it, we're not interested. See Figure 1. 7) Performance. Who needs it? If the machine is too slow for you, buy another one. We'll keep this as the mail machine. Anyway, you wait until X.400 arrives. We spoke to the OSI developers about performance, they think a lot like we do, they said "See Figure 1".

In conclusion, love the mail system or leave it, but don't complain.

[Bob Eager]

A friend and colleague (as was). He now works somewhere around Cambridge.

The meeting I referred to...!

And we all know that the system stood the test of time....NOT!

[Andy Hall]

I've got the same one somewhere - it is an all-time classic.

I can remember when UKC was offering a mail service with international connectivity and commercial companies were allowed to subscribe to it as long as they didn't spam UK academia (IIRC).

This was 10 years or so before this mail though and involved UUCP connecting systems together either with modem or IIRC X.25. I became quite skilled in wiriting the rather cryptic translations that were required to make sure that mail to and from other European countries and the U.S. didn't get munged by UKC's stuff.

It made writing Sendmail config files quite easy by comparison.

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[Andrew Gabriel]

But they did manage to get Czechoslovakia to change its name ;-)

[stefek.zaba]

There certainly was an AUP dealing with commercial use; when HPLabs started up in Bristol in late 1984 we had some friendly discussions with ukc about just how very researchy we were and how responsibly we'd be using their UUCP links. There was a lovely d-i-y element to mail addressing in UUCP days, since rather than just addresses, even end-users learned to use Routes, along the lines of ukc!seismo!final-dest!user, or the ARPA flavour of user%final-dest%seismo@ukc. And you tell people these days you sometimes mixed path notations, and they won't believe you... ;-)

[Andy Hall]

I remember having a very similar discussion with UKC along the same lines around that time, except I wasn't quite as researchy. It seemed to be largely a case of not being a nuisance.

I used to do that regularly. After a while one got to know the optimal routes to reach certain destinations because some sites would have long times between dialups or large queues of mail to deliver. Hence the UUCP tables became quite large as new destinations were crafted so that users didn't have to write the '!' format addresses remembering also to put the '' s in front to get them past the Unix shell.

Perhaps we should return to this as a spam prevention measure.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[Chris Hodges]

The funny thing is that many of the server names at manchester uni and umist (it's the same MAN) are in a form obivously derived from this.