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.
I'm a bit torn on this.
On the one hand, yes, the sender now knows for sure their message didn't
get through*.
On the other hand, the sender now calls *their* outgoing mail provider
to complain "You wouldn't let my message through!", and trying to
explain to someone that no, really, we can't do anything about this
because it's the recipient's system that doesn't like you is....
sometimes painfully tedious.
I have had a couple of cases where I tried to rephrase myself half a
dozen ways to explain this to a couple of senders; "you'll have to
contact them by some other method to get them to whitelist you, because
we literally CAN NOT force a message to be accepted". I'm pretty sure
that in one case I literally replied back "I don't know how else to put
this, we can't do anything because it's the recipient's mail system
that's rejecting the message".
On that basis I'm inclined to say that quarantining on the recipient end
is better, because the support burden then falls on the operator of the
misbehaving filter instead of the innocent sending platform.
I feel much the same about challenge-response filters; they offload the
problem from the person operating the filter onto everyone else.
-kgd
[*] Assuming they can make sense of the postmaster message in the first
place, which personal experience says "no, they really can't"... and
not just general end users, some "IT contractors" dealing with email
are, um, not entirely clued in to how SMTP works.
