Danger of unlimited message counts

General discussion re sg.

Danger of unlimited message counts

Postby Guest » Fri Mar 25, 2005 2:33 am

Sorry I'm not registered, so I couldn't reply to the thread in the developer forum where this subject was most recently mentioned. I also think the general forum is more appropriate.

I also appologize for creating a new thread on a subject which has been discussed before, but none of those threads shows a title specifically naming the danger I wish to discuss.

In the following threads [and possibly others] users have been shown ways to create disposables with infinite message counts:


As described in these threads, unlimited message counts are desirable for high-volume disposables so that such users do not have to reset their message counts with great frequency, or even have their counts driven to zero before they can be reset.

A valuable feature, but isn't this a risk of extra expense to spamgourmet? I remember threads in which our founders said that eating messages was cheaper than forwarding. I also recall that the founders do not intend to make a practice of deleting accounts, dormant or otherwise. This suggests that an account with unlimited disposables in it might be abandoned, leaving spamgourmet trying to forward unlimited messages.

Does the spamgourmet server software stop trying to forward once the protected address bounces a message [becomes invalid]? There is at least some reason to expect that a user abandoning spamgourmet might also abandon his protected address or ISP service at the same time; otherwise, any unlimited message counts would forward all that spam to his protected address, promting said user to shut off the unlimited messaging.

Even if the best scenario holds, it seems logical to me that a better way would be to deliberately make available a very large message count for those who want it, and deliberately eliminate any means of setting unlimited message counts.

If it was desired to limit the use of this feature, a confirming email, like that used for account setup, could be required; obviously, this would only be available in advanced mode.

This way, those who really want a very large limit could jump through a few hoops and get their large limits, but no account could ever be abandoned without at least some form of dead man's switch. Even if the limit was rather high, real spam [100+ daily?] would eventually wear down any abandoned account, and then the spam would just be eaten as always.
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