Philip Prindeville wrote:
> I'm looking at the headers I just got from a Canadian
> ISP's autoresponder I guess the software is called
> "KANA". Anyone know who owns this? (Yes, "someone
> not very clueful", I know... let's be more specific than
> that...)
>
>
>> Date: sam., 05 mai 2007 18:46:43 -0400
>> To: Abuse Department <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Subject: Bell Nexxia Inc. - Internet Abuse Centre (KMM15550329V5186L0KM)
>> From: Nexxia Abuse Bell Nexxia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Reply-To: Nexxia Abuse Bell Nexxia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> MIME-Version: 1.0
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset = "iso-8859-1"
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>> X-Mailer: KANA Response 7.1.0.9
>>
>
>
> The Date: line is damaged, apparently. KANA should be
> clobbering the LOCALE, LC_ALL and LC_TIME variables when it
> starts up, but clearly isn't doing this.
>
> Ironically, KANA is supposed to track Spam (and other service)
> tickets... but it just ends up muddying the waters by potentially
> creating more incidents of Spam.
>
> Quelle folie.
>
> -Philip
>
>
>
Spoke to someone at tech support for Kana. It seems they
immediately closed initial the ticket.
They said it didn't come from a customer, it wasn't clear
what the problem was, and it sounded like hate mail... so
I should take it up with the ISP.
I told them that (a) I had taken it up with the ISP, but it seems
that on your first day of training on ISP helpdesk staff, they
indoctrinate you to the fact that "no customer will ever know
more than you do, so resist any temptation to believe that
a customer might know something you don't or actually know
what he's talking about"... so the complaint with BellNexxia
went nowhere after 4 months... and (b) I pointed out to them
that if their product does allow customer configuration to
break standards-conformance... well, then they're allowing
customers to change things that shouldn't be changeable.
So once they got their hackles down, we actually had a
productive conversation where I explained to them that:
* I'm a software developer, and I've identified and diagnosed
issues with their product;
* That the customer, the public at large, and Kana are not well-
served by Kana having software that breaks standards
* I pointed them at the chapter and verse of RFC-2822 which
makes it quite clear what the format of date-specs is
* That having tickets generated in response to Spam complaints
which in turn trigger as false-positives as Spam just makes
matters worse... not better.
Of course, the issue now is that Kana is shipping version
9-dot-something of Response, and Bellnexxia is running 7.0.
Oh, well.
You can lead a horse to water... Oh, reminds me! The
Lippenzaners were just in town 2 days ago... ;-)
Anyone else know of any auto responders that seem to be
broken it terms of standards-conformance?
It would be cool for someone to set up a mailbox that you
could have your software send an email to... and it would send
back a conformance report stating what looked right and
what didn't.
Of course, that opens a whole can of potential joe-job attacks...
-Philip
