On Wednesday, July 06, 2011 12:48:26 pm Bill Hayles wrote: > Not necessarily. There are several end-user anti-spam packages, such as > Mailwasher, which will bounce rejected mail and make it appear that the > mail was never delivered.
Nope. Once the mail has been received by the server, there's no way to tell the sending server you won't accept it; you already have. What Mailwasher and other programs do is send the email back as if it wasn't accepted. Which is not the same thing. For example, if you do that you'll be sending an awful lot of spam yourself, to spammers who forge someone else's email address as their sender. To me, that's worse than doing nothing; if you do nothing, at least only you get inundated with spam; if you do that, innocent bystanders (google joejob) ge inundated, too. > However, I think that's a dubious practice as > most spammers take no notice, it adds to the volume of useless traffic on > the net, and you could be bombarding somebody unfortunate enough to have > an address used by the spammers. Therefore I don't do it, and encourage > others not to either. As I wrote above, it's worse than dubious. It's dangerous, and will eventually get you listed on blocklists; maybe even mine. But blocking at receipt is better, as you never deal with the message, and the sender's server gets to learn it's sending you spam. Whether or not it does something with it, it knows. > >As far as the spammer is concerned, the email is delivered. > > Do they ever take any notice of bounces? Given the number of mails > continually sent to non-existent addresses (which obviously ARE rejected) I > don't think so. They don't, but the ones that are accepting money based on deliveries either lie, or they look at non-receipt, because their customers want to know how many are delivered. It's what I call the borderline spammers, the guys who host mailings for companies with somewhat questionable lists, who learn from blocks, and who want to get unblocked, who clean up their acts. And the others? We don't really care, because we don't accept their mail and waste comparatively little in the way of machine resources and almost nothing in the way of human resources. > I know I only run a very small server, but the volume of > mail received by what I term "blunderbuss attacks" far exceeds spam to > genuine addresses. By blunderbuss what I mean is that the spammer > obviously has a list of common user names - [email protected], > [email protected] etc, and sends mail in the hope that the address exists. > With large mail servers, they probably do. For a domain and server with > 25 or so accounts, very often they don't, but they still arrive despite > the bounces. They arrive at your gate, but unless you've got a catchall address implemented for each domain, they don't get further. > This is Spain. We do things differently here! You sure do <smile>! Jeff -- Jeff Lasman, Nobaloney Internet Services Post Office Box 52200, Riverside, CA 92517 Our blists address used on lists is for list email only Phone +1 951 643-5345, or see: "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html"; -- ## List details at https://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
