On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 10:15:40AM -0600, Jay Maynard wrote: > On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 10:52:40AM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > The right thing to do is to accept these messages and discard them, > > rather than returning an error. That way you don't get unsubscribed > > from anything, and you also don't generate a lot of unhelpful additional > > traffic for postmasters around the world (spam generally does not have a > > useful return address). > > I don't generate bounces; I reject them during the SMTP transaction.
Yes, which causes the server you're talking to to generate an error. This will either end up in someone else's mailbox (if the forged address was a valid one) or in some postmaster's mailbox (if not). > I do not believe that silently discarding spam is a Good Idea. It's > nothing more than automation of hitting the delete key, which does nothing > to solve the spam problem. How does your method solve the spam problem? It seems to do more harm than good. I am of the opinion that we cannot suppress the noise, while we can filter it, and filter we should (without generating any additional noise). > I can whitelist the linux-390 mailing list...but how many folks here can > handle those character sets? Displaying them as ASCII is no answer, as it > shows up as unreadable garbage. I would argue that sending traffic in a > character set that almost nobody can display properly is just plain being > unneighborly, not to mention drastically reducing one's chances of getting > the answers one seeks. If some of these messages are not spam, then filtering them from the list would prevent those on the list who do can display and understand them from sending a helpful note to the sender. Linux/390 is in use around the world, including places with non-latin character sets. -- - mdz
