On Wed, Nov 19, 1997 at 12:48:27PM -0600, Jeremy Porter wrote:
The intent here is to do the following:
1) Alert the real sender if we can reasonably reach the person. 2) Alert the relay owner if they were relayed through without knowing about it (and pressure them to fix it - pronto!) 3) If we can't do either right away, toss the bounce on the floor on the premise that its better to give up than keep screwing around and clog up the pipeline.
What do the rest of you here think? Option (1) doesn't look very sound; the fight right now is between (2) and (3).
In my opinion, if you fix the relay problem to about 75%, the rest of the relays will get fixed or die, due to the spam volume, then one you solve the relaying problem, someone has to transmit all the messages themselves, which greatly lengths the time to detect them, and makes the cost of spamming go up. (It also allows IP based blocking to work better.)
Hmmm.. this seems to argue for the last approach - try to send the bounce to the FROM line at the relay, and failing that, send the bounce instead to {abuse|postmaster}@relay.site. The only reason I don't want to bypass the user ENTIRELY is that if the spamfilter gets someone who is legitimate (due to their being in the wrong place, etc) I want there to be a reasonable chance that they'll get notified by us that their mail was blocked and they need to talk to someone about it (they may be legitimately trying to reach a customer of ours). -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin http://www.mcs.net/ | T1's from $600 monthly to FULL DS-3 Service | NEW! K56Flex support on ALL modems Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| EXCLUSIVE NEW FEATURE ON ALL PERSONAL ACCOUNTS Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | *SPAMBLOCK* Technology now included at no cost