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Re: [LUG] sendmail rejects



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Adrian Midgley wrote:
| On Thursday 08 July 2004 22:18, Simon Waters wrote:
|
|
|>Mail to non-existent users should bounce, so that people know the email
|>wasn't delivered.
|
|
| There is the slight problem that bouncing confirms there are actually
some
| real addresses around the dud one.

It doesn't matter - it could still be a genuine email with a mistyped
address - email systems should be operated for the benefit of genuine
email users.

If the spammers took any notice, then issuing the appropriate reject
should reduce spam to non-existent addresses and I see precious little
evidence of this.

The whole design behind SMTP is that genuine mail is either delivered,
or returned to sender.

Antispam solutions (or any other change) that breaks this model should
be eyed with caution.

Indeed even antispam solutions that comply with this model can cause
issues, such as when I switched on Brightmail on my Demon account and
the bounces it sent caused my GNU mailing list subscriptions to be
suspended (it was bouncing the spam from the bug reporting address (open
mailing list) which triggered the "too many bounces from this address
rule" in mailman).

I fear the reason Alan doesn't get many complaints is that it doesn't
happen often, and people are resigned to email being less reliable these
days than it was a few years back before the spam and antispam solutions
appeared.
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