Re: [Pan-users] Empty posts in Pan?

[Duncan]

walt posted on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:06:21 +0000 as excerpted:

> One thing I don't understand, though, is that the message ID of your
> post when I read it with pan is
> <4dfe841c$0$30002$c3e8da3$5496439d-TdzfHllma3qy31vIhfwVxQC/
address@hidden>.
>  The posting-host is also from astraweb, not gmane.  I'm completely
> stumped, and I have no idea if this relates to your problem or not.

I believe you're seeing an artifact of gmane's email address obfuscation 
code.  When adding a list to gmane, it's possible to choose whether to 
activate this or not.  For quite some time the default was to activate 
it, altho there was a bit of discussion in gmane.discuss some time ago 
(two weeks? a month? three months?) about possibly changing that, and I'm 
not sure if it was changed based on that or not.

The idea is that a lot of list admins are sensitive to having list 
poster's addresses available publicly on the web and thru the news 
interface, where they believe spammers can easily harvest them, and this 
obfuscation, while irritating at times, does help overcome the hesitance 
of some admins to have their list made available thru gmane, so in that 
regard it's quite a good thing.  (FWIW, gmane takes some measures to 
prevent such harvesting, but of course it's still technically possible 
for a suitably determined and skilled spammer to harvest addresses from 
gmane if they are patient and try hard enough.)

But the email address detection algorithm gmane uses is rather dumb, 
obfuscating pretty much anything that even /looks/ like an email address, 
including many message-ids when posted in a message body (obviously it 
leaves message-ids alone in the references and message-id headers).

That's what you were seeing here, as this list has the obfuscation option 
turned on.

I've occasionally considered requesting that it be turned off for this 
list, but gmane normally only takes such requests from list admins.  I 
guess that'd be Petr Kovar, now?

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that those obfuscations *ARE* valid email 
forwarding addresses.  gmane's mail server will run any such mail it gets 
thru its spam filters, thus catching anyone trying to do a mass 
exploitation of them as well as the most obvious spam, and forward what 
passes on to the real unobfuscated email address.

Thus, it's quite possible to use the gmail obfuscation (which won't 
change between posts, for the same address) as an ordinary forwarding 
address for non-list-related purposes, letting the gmane spam filters 
have their take at it before forwarding it on to your regular address.  
Of course, it's not designed to be fully anonymous and anyone using it 
for something illegal would be flat stupid, but for "I'm not sure if I 
trust this joe random enough to give him my real email address, but I'd 
like to give him /some/ way of contacting me" type deals, posting a test 
message to an obfuscating list to get the gmail obfuscation of the 
address you used, and then giving the obfuscated gmane version to the 
semi-trusted joe random, could work quite well.  I'm sure people have 
used it for that before.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman