On 02.11.2012 17:02, David E. Ammouial wrote: > To prevent spam, I think it's important that there be no way of > detecting whether a given user exists or not. > > The behaviour in case of a non-existent user should be the same as if > they exist but decide to ignore you. What do you people think?
I'm really not sure. In email, there is in theory a way to find out whether a given user exists at a server without sending a mail – most servers (at least freemailers, didn't try others) disable that functionallity though. On one hand, it is annoying that, when peering with people, they don't get notified about a possible typo by the server. Instead, one can quickly assume a technical failure, especially if the typo is really non-obvious. On the other hand, this allows spammers to find out whether an address exists or not. I'm not sure which value that has to them. If I compare the two situations (please correct me if I oversee a peculiar point), I get to the following: If the server does *not* notify the subscriber whether the account exists, spammers may just try to send messages to the jid. These are either received by a person (who will probably put the spammer on his ignore list right away, and deny the subscription request) or go into the void, being dropped by the server. If the server *does* notify the subscriber, a spammer does not need to send his spam to the account, effectively reducing the load on the server. Then again it imposes social pressure to the user to which a subscription request was sent, because he/she might not want to insult a person who he/she does not actually want the subscriber in his/her roaster. Thats what I think about it. Both sides have their advantages and disadvantages. Just pushing arguments here, not sure about it myself. cheers. _______________________________________________ JDev mailing list Info: http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/jdev Unsubscribe: [email protected] _______________________________________________
