All the talk about overhead, spammers not honoring 5xx responses seems, to me, to miss a major point. We all accept that your gonna get a few false positives (particularly with tactics like blocking /8 address ranges), now what would you rather the sender of those genuine emails gets?
1) A failure with a valid reason and maybe contact address.
or
2) Nothing until the previous mailer to yours in the chain gives up retrying, probably best part of a week later, and times the messages out (possibly with a message implying that you have a rubbish mail service that doesn't respond to connection attempts).
Sure, a 550 is a more polite way to reject someone in the case that they do turn out to be a genuinue sender, no argument there....
But my point to the person I was responding to was that a 500 reject doesn't save you any bandwidth against an actual spammer, probably the opposite, since they ignore it and keep trying..
Regards, Simon
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