Today, we're addressing an issue related to the simpler days of e-mail, and, in particular, the assumptions of the times. For more than 10 years, every newsletter has contained Steve's "public" e-mail address - taylor@webtorials.com. And that address still works, although there are rather tight spam filters applied to it. The problem comes with the basic assumptions that were in place when some of our most fundamental protocols, such as SMTP, were written. And the most fundamentally flawed assumption was that people would obey rules and not abuse the network, which made sense roughly 25 years ago. The fundamental problem with SMTP is the ability to spoof the "from" address.

Spoofing the "from" address is technically trivial. As he writes this newsletter, Steve is being inundated by having an “obvious” e-mail address.

In particular, a spammer, who might be in Russia considering the number of messages that were sent to “.ru” address, blasted out some form of message with “taylor@webtorials.com” as the “reply to” address. As a result, Steve has received literally thousands of “undeliverable mail” messages within the past 24 hours - we’re talking about at least 6,000 e-mails.

In spite of all we try to do to optimize network performance, some of the issues like this are quite difficult to address. You need “undeliverable mail” messages when they are real. And they aren’t really spam because they come from individual sources. In fact, the only easy solution – which has lots of downsides – is setting your servers not to send “undeliverable” responses. (And this solution causes almost as many problems as it fixes.)

Let us know how you’re dealing with this issue, and we’ll share the ideas.

Correction: One of last week’s newsletters focused on the significance of 10 years of WAN newsletters and also offered a book review. Steve was obviously too deeply into reminiscing when he noted that the “Telecommunications and Data Communications Handbook” was written in 1997. If so, it would have been one of the most prophetic books ever penned. The publication date is 2007.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.