> On Wednesday, September 3 at 10:54 PM, quoth Peter Davis: > > Usually, the person responds to the "who are you?" message leaving > > the message body intact. So I want to have something embedded in > > the "who are you?" message that can point my script back to the > > original "so-and-so wants to join" message from Yahoo!, so I can > > reply to that. > > How about just a long random number?
This works, but you'd need to store the valid random number someplace. For a zero-knowledge approach you could do something like generate an MD5 hash of the prospective member's e-mail address with some secret that's shared between the script that sends the 'who are you' and the script that processes the reply. This would depend on some reasonable parsing of the sender address, though (to reduce it to [EMAIL PROTECTED], discarding <angle bracket enclosures> and any "real name" present). -- -D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] NSIT University of Chicago
