[leafnode-list] Message IDs

[Nathan Friess <natmanz@xxxxxxx>]

Hello.

I use leafnode for my small LAN to read and post messages to a few groups.
Recently I have found that I'm receiving a growing amount of spam sent to my
mail server because of my postings.  It seems that spammers are reading the
Message ID field that leafnode is inserting and sending mail to it, as if
it's an email address.  Of course, such emails don't exist and server
attempts to bounce them, but the emails end up double-bouncing back to me
(as you can guess, the from contains a bad email).  Although this poses very
little threat to me, it would be nice to be able to filter such emails so
that I can reject them before they are even attempted to be delivered.

I run qmail, so this would be easy if the IDs started with some common
string.  I noticed that leafnode always adds 'ln' just before the @ sign.
If instead, message IDs were in the form 'ln-[id]@host' qmail could be
easily configured for this.

I know that I could easily modify the code in nntpd.c which makes the id,
but I'm wondering if this would somehow break the whole concept of the
Message ID.  What does the Message ID mean?  Can I just change the format
without breaking leafnode or the whole world's NNTP servers?

If what I'm thinking is possible, I would suggest that the format be changed
so that other qmail users can easily handle this problem.  I'm not sure if
changing the format would help or hinder sendmail (or other) users, but that
should be taken into consideration too.

TIA for any discussion on this topic

Nathan Friess

PS: Please CC replies to me if possible, as I'm not sure if my subscribe
went through yet or not.



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