(keitai-l) Re: Changing Phone's E-mail From Address to Another Domain

From: Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net>
Date: 06/26/01
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0106261726400.17186-100000@denkigama.nat.shibuya.blink.co.jp>
On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Juergen Specht wrote:

> > Is it possible to convince my i-mode phone to put something other than my
> > "@docomo.ne.jp" address in the From: line of the e-mail?
> not that I know of and not that DoCoMo had any interest in this.

That's really too bad.

> You need a very good configuration for this kind of stuff.

True enough. Fortunately, I've got quite a lot of experience setting up
Internet e-mail systems. But that's why I think that, if you somehow could
change that darn From: line, there's a good commerical opportunity here.

> If you forward messages to your mobile phone and it is too
> big, it will be rejected by DoCoMo's mailserver.

Will it? Everything I've ever sent that was over-size was just truncated.
But I'd be keeping a copy in my regular mailbox, so that would be another
advantage of my system. (I wouldn't lose the extra data.)

> Depending
> on your configuration it will be send back to YOUR
> mailserver or to the original sender who possible gets
> confused that you are not reachable anymore => bad user
> experience.

Unless they accepted the message (I think they'd just do an SMTP reject,
wouldn't they?) AND were misconfigured to bounce to the From: line instead
of the envelope sender, it'd just come back to my system. Of course I'd
have the envelope sender set up to be delivered to a program that could
deal with this.

> Basically you should use just Remote Mail for 200Yen (?) a
> month. This works pretty well and has a nice interface and
> is much easier to setup :)

Yeah, but then I don't get instant notification of e-mail, which to my
mind is one of the best features. I also lose the ability to compose
a reply in an area with no service and send it when I get back into a
service area.

I can work around both of these problems with the kludge of sending
my outgoing e-mail back through my server (i.e., send it to my server,
which extracts a new From: line from the first line of the message and
forwards the mail), but that is extra work, which is annoying.

> > (Agh! I just received two copies of a spam! That brings me up to seven
> > today....)
> Every spam is also information! Especially if you write spam
> filters for this. You should not complain, you should
> collect and study it! ;)

Again, if it were going through my system and I got a copy to my regular
account, I could do that.  But here I have no headers and no envelope
sender, so I can't even see who it's really from. (Well, some spammers are
perhaps still dumb enough to use their real address in the From: line, but
something over half of mine these days use an obviously invalid addreess:
"0901234567@docomo.ne.jp", "foo@192.168.0.1", that sort of thing.)
The only good study I get out of it is practicing my kanji. :-)

I do intend to change my address soon, but that's not going to help for
all that long; the spammers can't stay this stupid forever. Anybody whose
mail address is four characters or less is doomed. Same for anyone with
one consisting of six or fewer Japanese syllables. Anybody with a common
name or word longer than that (English or Japanese), is going to follow
shortly thereafter. The ones with a single digit at the end will take a
little longer, and the ones with double digits rather longer than that,
but they'll all eventually go too.

I'm also hoping that docomo has been sensible enough to put a decent tech
or two on this; there are various things that they could do on their mail
servers to make life much tougher for spammers. I can think of a half
dozen off hand, and could probably find more if I saw their mail logs.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>  +81 3 5778 0123   de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil

She saw that he had singled her out from the three...for no reasoned purpose
of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders
from headquarters, unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last
intention of their lives is to be occupied with the feminine.


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Received on Tue Jun 26 11:47:13 2001