John E. Malmberg wrote:
The I.P. address is listed in bl.spamcop.net as hitting spamtraps.
Just so you know, spamcop view bounces as spam. According to them, you should never send bounces.
I think you will find a large amount of mail server administrators agree with that, especially the ones that have been DDOS from spammers and viruses impersonating their domain.
A few years ago I saw a posting in the spamcop.net forum reporting that AOL had posted in the SPAM-L mailing list that AOL was changing their system to only use SMTP rejects and that they were going to stop generating bounces because they recognized that the practice is abusive to the rest of the internet.
Spamcop.net only changed their policy a few months ago.
Spamhaus.org has also listed I.P. addresses that are bouncing all detected spam and viruses. As near as I can tell, they started doing before spamcop.net did, and it seemed to be triggered by a company selling an anti-spam/virus appliance that was configured by default to abusively bounce detected spam and viruses to what was known to be forged addresses.
At least one domain, test.com was basically DDOSed to death for a while because of the bounces from spammers and viruses forging addresses.
I believe the right approach is to convince admins to drop spamcop from their RBL list, rather than remove the very essential NACK SMTP has from all servers, as per spamcop's request.
The essential SMTP NACK is not what is the problem as long as it is done during the SMTP connection using reject codes. Issuing a SMTP reject code for undeliverable messages will never cause a spamcop.net listing.
The SMTP bounce is an artifact from the time when third party open relays where also in common use. At that time, it was needed by the third party open relay to return the non-delivery message.
The end mail server would use an SMTP reject, and the third party open relay would generate the bounce message.
Now, almost no mail servers will accept e-mail from known open relays, so when they can not deliver an e-mail, if they use an SMTP reject code, then the sender's mail server, which should trust the sender will generate the bounce message.
If these bounces from the sender's mail server are going to forged addresses, then there is a security problem on the sending network that needs to be fixed.
With almost all spam and viruses, there is no mail server to generate bounces from getting an SMTP reject.
At current estimates on internet, a mail server is now getting 3 spam/virus messages for every real message that is attempted to be delivered.
Which means if a mail server is bouncing instead of using SMTP rejects, it is bounce relaying 3 spam/virus messages for every real one, and those messages are being bounced to other victims.
And since medium to large networks pay a metered rate for their internet connection, bouncing instead of using SMTP rejects will significantly increase their operating costs as it will cause them to pay for the bandwidth for 6 spam/virus e-mails for every 1 real e-mail that they receive. Using SMTP rejects and DNSbls eliminates almost all of that cost from their operation.
-John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Personal Opinion Only
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