Re: [SAtalk] bouncing as an alternative to /dev/null

[Matt Sergeant]

John Rudd said the following on 25/11/02 12:01:

If you wish to not receive the spam at all, and let the spammer know about it, implement a spam filter in your SMTP engine and 550 the sender. I use qpsmtpd, and it's spamassassin plugin. It's very easy to extend it to 550 any high scoring spam (but I don't do that because I want to collect as much as I can ;-)

That doesn't fundamentally change the problem.  In the general case, the
message you get might (or for many sites, will definitley) be relayed
to you from an upstream provider such as your own ISP.

This is true. In that case, don't bounce. This only works where your Spam detection engine is in the SMTP server pointed at by your domain's MX record. I guess I just assumed anyone attempting to do this would know that.

The choices are:

1) no blacklisting --  blacklisting has been such an improvement in my
fight against spam, that there's no way I'd drop it.

Yeah, blacklisting is a bit like stopping any email with the word "Viagra" in it. Works *great* for some people, but falls down badly if you're a pharmacist ;-)

2) manual blacklisting after human review -- doesn't scale, it's just too
time consuming.  (my home email address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... I get way
too much spam to wade through all of it by hand)

3) automatic blacklisting without notification -- bad idea, IMO, because
there is a likelihood of false positives, so without either human review
or notification, automatic blacklisting (or automatic deleting) is just
not a good idea.

4) automatic blacklisting with some form of notification (the mechanism
I've described, or the slight improvement you describe) -- removes the
false positive problem by allowing the sender to appeal.

If the sender doesn't appeal (because frankly it's just big headed that the recipient is so important as to require someone to do this), then it's a false positive no matter how you define spam.

Matt.



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