Re: Loads of spam showing "Delviery Status Notification", "Failure Notice" etc.

"Mike Easter" wrote:

> Ant wrote:
>> I reckon there's a high probability they wouldn't know anything beyond
>> the user interface.
>
> Well, you know how that works.  Somewhere there is a highly technically
> competent webtv/er -- who could explain to you or me rationally why they
> do their connectivity that way and just how everything works.

Yeah. Saw the word "user" in relation to something I see as not
requiring computing/network knowledge and just started typing. You
know how that works; on Usenet one gets conditioned to seeing it
prefixed with "l" in the mind's eye (no offence to webtv-ers implied).
I should know better.

> Well, there's a little bit of a 'special' or atypical arrangement if a
> webtv/er gets to feed the news.spamcop.net newserver thru' the webtv
> proprietary interface. -- whereas google's newsfeed basically doesn't --
> except when it rarely does.

I meant there might be no special peering arrangement in the sense
that required cooperation, permission or action from a spamcop news
admin. However, obviously spamcop is aware of the need to cater for
webtv users, as shown by the FAQ link you just provided.

> Of course, there's a lot of different ways you could do things, like
> gmane or Hamster.  Let Hamster be your own newsserver and access
> whatever newsservers it wanted to.

I was thinking something like that might be behind the interface for
webtv.

>>> The webtv spamcop groups are called news.spamcop.* where * = <nil>,
>>> geeks, social, & spam
>>
>> I couldn't find the spamcop groups by way of that link.
>
> I didn't get the webtv spamcop names there, I got it from the nntp info
> page http://www.spamcop.net/help.shtml#nntp -- in the Delivery method -
> WebTV link properties.

The only difference between the two types of link is that the webtv
ones don't specify the server (there's actually a colon after "news",
not a period as you indicated above). So if your default server was
news.spamcop.net, both sets of links would work for non-webtv users.

> The reason I put that 'newsserver' in quotes was because AOL's wasn't
> actually a nntp newsserver, but something else -- but I don't know
> enough to understand exactly what it was.

Clearly there's something at webtv which understands the "news:"
scheme identifier, and directs the request to their default
thing-a-ma-jig which handles it.

> You can build all kinds of funky things if you know what you are doing.
> Stephen Gielda of cotse and packetderm and missingamendment fame - the
> privacy dude - built a handy dandy little nntp posting thing so that you
> don't have to access the newsserver directly.  He called it
> 'news2remail' -- but it isn't a standard remailer, but just another
> cotse privacy tool.  He's got a lot of neat things at his site, and the
> service is very economical.

Was that an ad for Cotse? ;)  My impression of Steve is a competent
guy who provides a valuable service for some. So far, I've not had the
need for what he offers. I take it the "amendment" is a US privacy
thing? In the UK I believe we're better protected in that regard.