Re: [Pan-users] Pan email snag

[Duncan]

On Sat 01 Mar 2003 03:10, Brian Morrison posted as excerpted below:
> When I post to Usenet I use an invalid address within my own domain,
> hence anything that arrives addressed to it will bounce as exim simply
> says "550 Do not darken my door etc".
>
> Now, my Reply-To: address is valid. However, if I choose to reply by
> email, Pan uses the invalid From address and exim quite understandably
> says "550 user unknown". I can't see any way of making this work
> properly without a change to Pan so that the address used in mail is the
> Reply-To: address put put into the From: field.

Charles beat me to it, but he's right.  I too use an invalid news profile 
address, but a valid mail profile address.  Once you have the separate mail 
and news profiles, all you have to do is check the appropriate "make default 
for (mail|news)" option for each profile, and it should work correctly.  It 
does here.

BTW, rather than altogether invalid, I use a munged address.  The base address 
is similar to the h4x0r3d lists address I use here, but news instead, but 
then I add .replytogroup. in the middle, and .please at the end, so it's not 
a valid TLD.  Furthermore, I mention in my sig "Newsgroup replies prefered, 
see X-Munging headers for details, then use PAN's custom headers feature to 
insert this:

x-munging1: Usenet replies preferred,  If you MUST reply by
x-munging2: mail, do ALL the following to avoid the spam traps.
x-munging3: 1) Use plain text.  HTML format auto-deleted, unseen.
x-munging4: 2) Remove address reply and please phrases.
x-munging5: 3) Put " -news" at the END of the subject
x-munging6: (no quotes, space, dash, news, END)
x-munging7: That should get the message thru my filters.

Using that, people can get thru to me if needed, but it gets the point across.  
In addition, I already filter HTML mail for security reasons, and on that 
address, filter anything that does NOT have "-news" at the end of the subject 
as well, in case the spam bots DO figure out how to de-munge it, or someone 
decides I need some junk mail.

Finally, I use a dedicated news only e-mail address, just as I use a dedicated 
lists address, so if I DO start getting a bunch of spam on it, I can easily 
change it, without the hassle of notifying EVERYONE and having to change it 
EVERYWHERE.

Of course, if you have your own domain, another solution I saw works quite 
well.  Someone used an address of the form address@hidden, then 
explained in the sig that his address in January of 2000 was news0001, while 
in January of 2099 it would be news9901.  Thus, he was able to post with a 
current un-munged address for ease of current contact, cycled each month with 
a cron script to avoid increasing spam (a job on the first would add the new 
address and update his reader config, while another on the 15th would delete 
the old one, so there was always a two week leeway), but if anyone were to 
read his archived posts on Google or whatever, they could still reach him 
with little trouble.

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin