On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 06:39:45PM +0200, Erik Lindahl wrote:
> We've had qmail working splendid for a while, but
> just got a new problem when the free RBL services were
> discontinued and there are less sites we refuse based on ip:
>
> Apparently, spammers send mails to nonexistent users and
> rely on qmail bouncing this to the reply-to adress. By setting
> the reply-to to a suitable adress you get relaying, albeit
> wrapped in a qmail bounce-message.
qmail will not bounce anything to a reply-to address; it bounces to the
envelope sender.
It's not likely that spammers are doing what you say. It's more likely that
they think that the address to which they think they're sending spam is valid,
but it isn't. I don't know where they get a hold of these bogus addresses.
There's a whole slew of spam-only addresses I get mail for; these addresses
have never been valid.
It really makes no sense to relay mail this way, since a spammer would have to
send one message for each spam recipient. If he does this, he might as well
just send the mail directly to his victims.
Chris
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