Bill Cole wrote:
Rejecting mail is a far better choice than delivering to a 'spam box'
since most users never bother looking there for anything. Rejections at
least stand some chance of making enough noise on the sender side to get
misconfigurations fixed.
IME exactly the opposite is true, because all too many automated notices
are fire-and-forget - the senders don't even have the infrastructure to
handle bounce messages, never mind bring them up to the attention of
someone who can fix things. Or the notices are sent entirely by hand,
but some "helpful" IT support monkey has gone and blacklisted all
postmaster notices (or worse, sent them to /dev/null automatically).
At least if the message gets misfiled in the recipient's spam folder
they've got some chance of finding the actual message, and a better
chance of then informing someone who can fix the misfiring filter.
We had a case recently where a customer's one-man-band IT "support
provider" couldn't seem to understand the idea that if our server tries
to pass on a message and gets:
550 Rejected for spammy content
back in a postmaster notice, any further investigation MUST be started
by the recipient, because it's the recipient's mail system doing the
rejecting.
They had a couple of examples of rejected messages sent through other
outbound servers to the same recipients, too, so it really was something
to do with the content of their mail, not some property of our mail
cluster. I have a feeling there will be Words Spoken when (almost
certainly not "if") their move to Office 365 doesn't fix the problem.
-kgd
