In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Noel Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I agree that false positives are bad... but hopefully you're >rejecting mail and not discarding it. When (legit) mail is >rejected, the sender is notified and you'll hear about it... In a perfect world yes. Unfortunately, I don't live there. In reality, there are three classes of people who receive bounce messages, i.e. (1) ignorant people (like my family) who don't have the vaguest idea what to make of bounce messages and (2) people who _do_ understand bounce messages, but for reasons of expediency never bother to inform the original intended recipient that he/she has a problem "on the recipient end" and (3) people who both understand the meaning and content of bounce messages and who are kind enough to take the time to inform the intended recipient of a problem. My own limited experience tend to indicate that the size of _either_ category (1) _or_ category (2) alone is in fact vastly larger than the size of category (3). Other people have shared with me similar impressions. So anyway, for a long long time now, there's been a running debate amoung anti-spam tool builders: Is it better to reject at the SMTP transaction level (or later, although _that_ is widely deplored as creating "backscatter"), thus creating a "bounce" message, or is it better to take everything in and then just shunt the detectably "bad stuff" into the recipient's spam folder. No single answer as to which of these choices is best has prevailed to date. This situation leaves me, at least, wondering if we cannot have our cake and eat it to. My belief is that by employing the marvelous flexibility of Postfix there must be a way to _both_ accept all incoming messages bound for valid local recipient addresses _and_ also reject some subset of those messages just after the end of the DATA phase of the associated SMTP transaction. I think that doing both would result in an ideal scenario, where recipients could always check their spam folders, e.g. when they have reason to believe that they have somehow missed an important incoming message... possibly due to over-agressive spam filtering... and yet at the same time, the senders of messages that have been relagated to the outer darkness of the recipient's spam folder would be notified... in a way that avoids the backscatter problem... of the fact that their messages may not be seen immediately (or at all) by the intended recipient. As I say, I think that both goals can be satisfied using Postfix. I just don't happen to know offhand how to do that. I'm guessing that perhaps this kind of dual-track treatment of incoming messages might be implemented via the judicious application of some sort of SMTP proxy (as described in the SMTPD_PROXY_README file) but I would certainly be happy to read other and more well-informed opinions about this than my own.
