I am far from an anti SPAM expert, but:
On 8/13/2022 4:52 PM, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
On 2022-08-13 14:05:43 -0400, joe a wrote:
On 8/13/2022 12:38 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
. . .
2) There's no mandatory need to REJECT spam. It has always been up to
the recipient to decide whether to return it to the sender or not.
Agreed in part. I see returning SPAM to sender as an exercise in futility
or perhaps further enabling. But I do prefer labeling as SPAM to outright
rejection in many cases.
Rejecting mail (instead of accepting it and dropping it) is useful
in case of false positives.
That may be so and of use to a legitimate sender that actually cares
about such things. A true SPAM'er could not care less.
3) It would be rather trivial to return spam to sender with a suitable
admonishment but I decided that its not worth my time to write such
a discriminator and maintain yet another set of rules about what gets
quarantined and what gets returned: better to quarantine it so
it can be analysed with the mk 1 eyeball.
To add my comment, returning SPAM, assuming it even reaches the original
sender, may serve only to assure them of the effectiveness of their campaign
to reach valid addresses. In effect "helping" them.
Well, if you don't reject the mail with the reason that the address
is invalid, the spammer could deduce that the address is valid
(at least potentially valid). By not rejecting spam, the spammer
could think that the spam arrived at its destination and would
validate the address.
Rejecting mail for an invalid recipient was not my concern. In the case
of an invalid email address is certainly proper to inform the sender of
that fact.
I could even agree that informing senders of "false positives" is useful
as well, but doing that via a "REJECT" would seem burdensome.
REJECT-ing email that is flagged by one of the DNS RBL thingies still
seems to me to be wasted effort and possibly counter productive.
Why waste your own system resources to help a scoundrel? Drop them and
be done.
joe a.
