>> The refusal of, e.g., yahoo, to accept plain text complaints provides >> an incentive for MUA authors to write such tools. Given the number of >> e-mail clients that are broken in one way or another, I'd rather see >> some guidance in an RFC before the avalanche starts. Restraining the >> MUA authors is not feasible. > >What do others think about this point? Given the number of direct complaints >John, Yakov and I got >from Yahoo members when Yahoo decided to accept only ARF reports, it seems >like we might be able to >say we have experience that this creates a big problem for a lot of people. >And it's true that >software to generate ARFs will start appearing, if it hasn't already.
I think I've gotten maybe a dozen complaints from people whose abuse reports were rejected by Yahoo. Considering how much mail Yahoo sends, that rounds to zero. Of those dozen complaints, it's not clear to me how many of them would have been actionable of Yahoo did accept them, since I didn't get the impression that people understood sending the headers, recognizing obvious forgeries, and the like. It may seem rude to say this, but if you can't figure out how to send an ARF report, you probably weren't sending actionable reports in the first place. Most useful reports come from other mail systems, triggered by users pushing the spam button. I also can't have much sympathy for the argument that there is a desperate need for a standard to desribe a way for users of random MUAs to force complaints into Yahoo. How long have they been ARF only, at least a year? How many MUA ARF generators are there? None that I'm aware of. (I can run the script I use to send all my abuse reports from Alpine on my FreeBSD laptop, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone else. And even there, the vast majority of my reports are sent from the server side.) That's not even a descending snowflake, much less an avalanche. If you want to write a plugin or script to send ARF reports from your MUA, go ahead. You don't need our permission. But it's not something that's going to be used by even 0.01% of mail users, so it's not worth addressing in a standards document. R's, John _______________________________________________ marf mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/marf
