3/31/2003 3:46:36 PM, Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> wrote:
We definitely should NOT crawl the site, just in case it really is an innocent url. The load can crush a site, particularly if it's hosted.
Richard> Nah. You need to throw thousands of requests at a half-decent Richard> web server before it gives up the ghost. And if they're sending Richard> out 10 million mail pieces, they should expect their http Richard> server to take some load. These are definitely NOT innocent Richard> emails. They come from bogus senders, have minimal headers Richard> (deliberately), and contain *nothing* but a url. Which points, Richard> via redirect naturally, to an incest porn or get-a-huge-penis Richard> site, etc.
You can't make that judgement beforehand. If the site you are poking is a valid site and the email received was not spam, none of what you said holds. If I remember correctly, you said this was only to be performed in circumstances where certain criteria were met, none of which included a conclusion the mail was spam.
That's right. We really should try to solve this problem with tokenization.
Skip
c'est moi - TimS http://www.fourstonesExpressions.com http://wecanstopspam.org There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.