[Linux-aus] Automatically punished for doing the right thing?

[Leon Brooks]

On Monday 17 October 2005 14:14, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 12:52:19PM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
>> On Wednesday 31 August 2005 08:03, Mary Gardiner wrote:
>>> You might have just got unlucky, refused a mail with a faked
>>> bounce address, and the relay that was sending the spam on
>>> obediantly passed those bounces onto the genuine article.

>> Possibly. I refused the mail with a 550 at SMTP time. I s'pose I
>> could troll through Digital's logs and see what it thinks happened.

> Or just move to silently rejecting mail you decide is spam, to
> prevent people like myself from being flooded with fake bounces.

No. Then you also silently reject the occasional real email without 
notice, and the terrorists have won.

Bouncing it with a 550 at SMTP time as I do thwarts the vast majority of 
SPAM without generating an actual bounce message. The only time you'll 
get a bounce from trying to send me SPAM is if the server at your end 
(or the spammer's end) generates it. The vast majority of SPAM I block 
is sent either by botnets or by servers which don't care, so it doesn't 
generate bounces, just tells the sending server to wind some barbed 
wire around a star-picket and then tin-soldier it.

The SPAM I filter after SMTP time does get dumped, but that's 
unquestionably spam. None of the internal filtering will be triggered 
by sending-server misconfiguration.

Cheers; Leon

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