On 8 Nov 2008, at 03:46, Stefan Förster wrote:
This has never been a problem for me because the amount of junk email
sent to postmaster and abuse is absolutely negligible. I don't want to
know what happens, though, if that address was used every day...
I've noticed the same in the past, and it always puzzled me a
little... I suppose spamming the abuse/postmaster is a somewhat
faster way to find oneself blacklisted; but on the other hand, I don't
really understand why spammers would take the effort to avoid those
addresses...afterall, it's easier to guess "postmaster" and "abuse"
than the random letter/number strings I'm seeing in my mail logs.
On 8 Nov 2008, at 04:41, mouss wrote:
Martin Strand wrote:
Neil's bcc suggestion is definitely a better idea, but since I'm
dealing with such non-technical customers they will likely never be
interested in actual postmaster mail so I'll leave everything the
way it is for now. Perhaps that'll have to change some day.
No. if customer uses it as a personal address, you should not read
it, bcc it, ... etc.
I agree...with a caveat:
If the customer, "Don't monitor postmaster & abuse for me, I'll handle
everything.", I think I would simply shrug and oblige the customer,
after reminding him that we will have to part ways if he affects
service for everyone else in some fashion (one scenario that comes to
mind is an amateurish spammer). And then I'd leave it to him, until
there was a problem. Hopefully, in this scenario, the customer has an
idea of what he's doing, so I don't have to do it.
However, this customer does not sound like he knows what he's
doing...if he did, I think he'd know not to use the postmaster address
for personal mail (or if he didn't know better at the time, he
would've migrated out of it by now). As such, I would be inclined to
want to continue monitoring his postmaster and abuse addresses (as if
they weren't being used by him) because it will help me to help him if
there's a problem, and he doesn't seem like he can handle it entirely
on his own.
So, to that end, I would simply tell him that we've made it a general
policy to do the BCC/monitoring thing on postmaster and abuse address
in the hope that, hearing that, he'll migrate away from using
postmaster (and I would be happy to help him with that, setting up
redirects/filters/etc.). Basically, I'd be using a little social
engineering; and perhaps its a bit dirty to do so, but I think I could
sleep at night with that, since I think it would be in his best
interest. I wouldn't force the issue though; if he insisted, I'd be
fine with letting him have his way.
But, to be clear, I'm not advocating monitoring his personal mailbox,
whatever it may be.
Neil.
