[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
DAve wrote:
We have not chosen a course of action yet. It looks as if the only
*solution* is to not send any mail to AOL accounts. From a business
standpoint this is not acceptable. But, if AOL users will tag a
confirmation message as Spam, what's an admin to do?
For an outside-the-box kind of approach... not seriously advocating this, but
an interesting thought experiment...
1) Visitor goes to your site
2) Visitor fills out registration info including their email address [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
3) User clicks "Register"
4) Your web server generates a one-time disposable-use email address such as:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
5) Your web server adds a row to a "Registrations awaiting confirmation" with
these fields:
Registrant: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Confirmation email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
6) Your web server gives the user the following instructions:
"Two steps remaining. To confirm your email address, please send us an email from
your [EMAIL PROTECTED] account. Send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- we will send you a reply
with a link. Click on that link, and your registration will be confirmed."
7) User sends an email
From: aol-example.com
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
8) Your mail server receives the email and hands it off to some kind of mail
processing script.
9) The mail processing script verifies the From: and To: against the "Registrations
awaiting confirmation" table.
10) If they match, the mail processing script fires off a reply:
"One final step remaining. Please click this link to verify your registration."
If AOL complains about that reply, you pull up your logs and ask them "how could it
be spam when THEY emailed ME first??"
I like it. Since I use qmail+vpopmail+mysql I can easily have the
website create an address as an alias in the SQL table and make the
alias point to the processing script.
I can also create an SA whitelist entry in SQL for messages To the temp
account, From the expected sender. Interesting idea....
Thanks, I'll chew on that for a few days.
DAve
--
This message was checked by forty monkeys and
found to not contain any SPAM whatsoever.
Your monkeys may vary
