Is it possible to setup Imail 6.04 to generate a Message-ID for
all sending Emails via SMTP ?
Reason:
Outlook XP and Outlook 2003 don�t generate Message-Ids,
and the most Anti-Spam-Programms marks Emails as Spam without
Message-ID because it is a typical Spam.
# Message-ID Spam tests
Message-ID: {\<\>} [empty Message-ID]
@Message-ID: {[a-z0-9]{1,}}
Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Message-ID without @]
See statement from Microsoft down:
Thanks Roland
---------------------------------------
microsoft.public.outlook.general
## Outlook XP and Outlook 2003 don�t generate Message-Ids ##
We made this change because we've had a number of complaints about
revealing
internal machine names in the Message-IDs we generated.
As you know, a message id has an ID portion
preceeding the '@' sign, followed by the name of the machine that
generated
that ID. So if, for example, you're sending mail via your ISP or
Hotmail
from your work machine, your work machine's name would be in the
Message-ID.
A number of people have objected to this for two major reasons:
1) Revealing internal machine names provides information that hackers
can
potentially use to compromise the network.
2) They don't want to reveal their employer when sending mail via their
ISP
from work, and a message id generated by Outlook would contain the
domain
name of their employer.
We felt that the requests to change this were very valid, and thus
changed
Outlook so that it relies on the SMTP server to generate the message id.
Not generating the Message-ID does protect the internal network -
servers
are much more likely to be hardened than client workstations, and as you
say
they're already revealing themselves in Received lines. What is not
revealed by Outlook not writing the Message-ID is the typically more
vulnerable Joe User workstation. Many corporate server environments
will
either not write the original client submission information in the
Received
line or will rewrite the entire Received history when the message
reaches
the boundary between the corporate intranet and the Internet so as to
remove
that internal machine information.
As to the argument of not changing the Message-ID format because there
are
anti-spam programs that verify that against, say, X-Mailer, how long do
you
think it would be before the majority of spammers caught on to that
anyway?
Used to be that most spam was incredibly ill-formed, but clearly they're
getting more and more sophisticated and anti-spam programs clearly have
to
deal with that. Saying that Outlook should no longer change to meet
customer needs because it might break an anti-spam program somewhere
just
isn't going to fly, IMHO.
If Yahoo's servers aren't doing the right thing and adding a Message-ID,
they need to be reconfigured to do so. As has been pointed out, RFC
2822
applies to server-server interactions, not client-server interactions,
so
it's necessary for servers to ensure the validity of the messages they
send.
Yahoo is apparently not doing so.
--
Jeff Stephenson
Outlook Development
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