The Arcade BBS/arcadebbs.zip/arcadebbs/bbstools/WWIV Mods/WWCPBETA.ZIP/TWIT.DOC

Text File | 1993-05-14 | 3.9 KB | 87 lines

Unfortunately, it's become painfully clear that there are a lot of
people on the nets without a shred of common sense. People are
constantly trying to have files sent from file servers, subscribing
to mailing lists, and doing all sorts of other Unfriendly Stuff
through the WWCP gateways. Too much of this could literally
destroy a WWIV-based network, and (because of the way WWIV networking
functions) it's guaranteed to give WWCP a bad odor in the WWIV world
even if it doesn't get to the point of net paralysis. Not to mention
that it may cost *you* money, particularly if you're paying for a
mail feed (or calling long distance to get one). Thus, this version of
WWCP supports a "twitlist" feature. It allows you to selectively
disable mail to and from certain addresses.

To use the feature,  you need to make two new files in your waffle/system
directory, WWPOLICY and WWTWIT. Samples files for both are included. WWPOLICY
contains your gateway policy statement. WWTWIT is the twit list itself. It
contains a list of addresses, one per line, to which mail is disabled.
Unix-style wildcarding is supported. * matches any number of characters,
? matches a single character, and a range of characters can be specified
with []. WWTWIT is the file name for your primary network. If you're in
more than one WWIV network, you need to have a separate twit file for each
one. Use the same extender that you use for your other files (see
MULTINET.DOC for more details).

The * and ? wild cards work just about the same way that they do in
DOS. The [] construct is used thusly: to match either the character a
or the character b, use [ab]. To match a range of characters, use something
like [a-z]. This will match any lower-case alphabetic character. To
match any numeric character, you could use [0-9].


If an address is placed in the WWTWIT file, mail both to and from
that address will be disabled. The "To:", "From:", "From", and "for"
lines are all checked. The only mail a twitted WWIVnet user will be
able to send is to postmaster@site, where site is the site name
listed on the first line of your WWSTAT file. Twitted mail coming
from the WWIVnet will result in the policy statement being returned
to the originator of the mail. Twitted mail coming from the Internet
will be bounced.

Both Internet and WWIVnet addresses can be placed in the twit file.
If you put WWIVnet addresses in it, they should be in the form
that normally appears in the From: line of your gated messages.

However, you may want to use a wildcard scheme to guard against a
"clever" user getting around the twitting. Using something like:

*33-9999*

in the twit file will block addresses like [e-mail],
wwiv![e-mail], foobox!yoursite!wwiv!33-9999, etc.


You can enable mail to/from certain users to/from twitted addresses by using
the ! negation operator. A line in the twit file that begins with a
! will allow mail to/from that address to flow through the gateway
even if it is to/from a twitted user. At the very least, you'll probably
want to do this with your own address. Example: Your mail address is
[e-mail]. To allow you to send and recieve mail from twitted
users, put the line:

![e-mail]

in the twit file. You could also allow mail to/from your local machine
only and prevent mail being forwarded across the network by using a couple
of lines like:

*
!*@foobar.com

The * line prohibits all mail from passing through the gateway, while
the !*@foobar.com reenables mail for your local site. An address
negated with ! overrides any other restriction that may be present.
At a minimum, you should have the lines:

!*ostmaster*
!MAILER-DAEMON*

in the file, to allow messages from [Pp]ostmaster@wherever to go through.
This will allow bounce messages to pass through the gateway properly,
and may help avoid bounce loops.

All email to/from a forbidden address is noted in the WWMAIL file in your
admin directory.