On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 00:42 +1200, Jeremy Bowen wrote: > You're coming at this too late. The RFCs only require the MTA send a > bounce if it is unable to deliver mail that it has *accepted*. I'm > arguing that the MTA should not have accepted it in the first place if > it can determine beforehand that it will be unable to deliver it (eg. > unknown local sender)
qmail doesn't support that feature (well, it does with patches, but out of the box it doesn't). > If you want to follow the RFCs to the letter then you are correct. You > should be dining out on a healthy serving of SPAM and viruses. Honestly > this may have been acceptable once upon a time but no-one in their right > mind would expect all viruses to be successfully delivered to a user's > inbox. I also think you'd be hard pressed to find a responsible > sys-admin who advocates bouncing a virus payload to a (probably forged) > sender listed in the From: header *regardless* of what is written in the > RFCs. All true... > >However, usually this 'back-scatter' is due to the original recipients > >system not running any spam filter/virus filter, and as such, they do > >follow the RFC completely, and dutifully send you your bounce message. > > > No, you've missed the point yet again. This has nothing to do with > spam/virus filters. You really don't understand the situation. > Back-scatter comes from the 2nd party involved in the transaction who > has accepted mail that it cannot deliver. This doesn't have to be SPAM > or a virus (but it usually is), it could simply be mis-addressed. Rather > than accepting it and then bouncing it to an innocent 3rd party, the > appropriate behaviour would be to reject it (eg with code 5xx) before > the DATA part of the SMTP conversation. except qmail doesn't support that, and this is the qmail-scanner mailinglist, which implies we are talking about qmail as the MTA. > It's really simple. An MTA should never accept mail if it can determine > that it will be unable to deliver it. > If an MTA does accept email for delivery, it should NEVER bounce it > (transient failures to legitimate addresses excepted). So you are claiming that qmail is broken... Then I assume you won't be using it, nor qmail-scanner, so you can un-subscribe from this list, and we can get-on with on-topic emails. > OB Trans-Tasman joke: > Q: Why are Australians like computers ? > A: Because you have to punch information into both of them. Let's not get into stupid name-calling, there are plenty of stupid jokes about NZ folk as well... BTW, personally, I reject virus/spam/mime error emails with a 5xx message AFTER the DATA/body has been sent, but that is acheived by modifying qmail-scanner (and slightly qmail-queue to support more informative 5xx messages/reasons. Finally, I understand you are pissed off, so should I be, since multiple of my customers regularly are affected by these things where they will get a few hundred to a few thousand such messages. I get them so often, that I don't even notice it anymore.... but, let's remember where we are, and talk about on-topic stuff. Regards, Adam -- -- Adam Goryachev Website Managers Ph: +61 2 9345 4395 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax: +61 2 9345 4396 www.websitemanagers.com.au ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games. How far can you shotput a projector? How fast can you ride your desk chair down the office luge track? If you want to score the big prize, get to know the little guy. Play to win an NEC 61" plasma display: http://www.necitguy.com/?r=20 _______________________________________________ Qmail-scanner-general mailing list Qmail-scanner-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qmail-scanner-general
