Jerry,
The problem is that I receive nearly 10,000 emails a day with invalid recipient names. Spammers love to simply walk through a dictionary of names for recipients hoping for hit.
Maybe the solution is to detect the dictionary attacks.
We would need to keep count of failed address requests from a single IP address in any given period. If this number exceeds a threshold we fast fail. Any failed address attempts under this threshold generate a bounce message in the normal way which gets placed in a queue. Bounce messages in this queue only get sent after a sufficient delay has occurred to be sure the sender wasn't performing a dictionary attack. If the source is judged to be an attacker then all bounce messages in the queue get deleted.
With the threat of dictionary attacks out of the way you could perform your ethical duty to send bounce mails to users who have legitimately mis-typed an address, while avoiding SpamCop's trap. Even better... servers which have tripped your threshold will be fast failed even if they use correct email addresses... so legitimate email addresses won't get put into their spam list.
- David --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
