Accepting mail for delivery, and then either silently dropping it, delaying it for days, or putting mail that in no way resembles spam into a spam folder seems a little worse than “doing what the standards say”. If you’re going to decide, on little or no evidence, that a message is spam or otherwise does not deserve to get delivered, the least you could do is to bounce it so that the sender is aware. No need to generate a bounce mail that could turn into backscatter; just reject the mail during the SMTP exchange. Jim Shankland
I think they have turned some knobs recently (or rather, they continuously do). Yesterday's soft reject (i.e. mail ending up in the spam folder) became a hard reject. I guess it's possible to argue both ways - at least the soft reject could be trained not to categorise real mail as spam. With a hard reject that problem is shifted entirely to the sender.
Robert
