Jeremy Kitchen wrote: > On Thursday 05 January 2006 09:49, Daniel J McDonald wrote: >> On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 09:44 -0800, Jeremy Kitchen wrote: >>> On Thursday 05 January 2006 08:08, Shayne Lebrun wrote: >>>> >>>> Still probably bad form, as you'd be spamming the living daylights >>>> out of the poor recipient. >>> >>> this is why you simply reject (5xx) the message at the gates. >> >> And then they send it to your backup spam filter, and again and >> again.... > > any legitimate MTA treating a 5xx response as a "I won't take it, but > try my backup MXs" should be shot, along with the author(s) and the > operator(s).
This is an undecidable question. There are legitimate arguments for both sides: 1) Accept then discard 2) Reject There is wide agreement that the third option is bad: 3) Accept then construct bounce message I myself am firmly in the "Reject" camp. IMHO the strongest argument for 1) is the "innocent bystander" analogy. Suppose you're manning a post office counter. A young man with his head shaved and "Fight the Power" tattoos hands you a ticking package with grease stains. He keeps looking over his shoulder. The return address on the package is the White House (this post office is nowhere near Washington DC) What do you do? 1) Say "thank you, sir", wait until he leaves, then drop the package into a concrete bunker and blow it up 2) Say "I'm sorry but I can't accept this package" 3) Accept the package and send it to the White House with a Post-It note saying "we weren't able to deliver this package to the recipient because it looks like a bomb" -- Matthew.van.Eerde (at) hbinc.com 805.964.4554 x902 Hispanic Business Inc./HireDiversity.com Software Engineer _______________________________________________ http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
