On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:05:44 -0400 (EDT), "Dan Mahoney, System Admin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Jeff Chan wrote: > > >> Pedantic nit-pick of the day: > >> I'm sure you meant reject instead of bounce, right? > > > > "Bounce" to some means reject. "Bounce" to others means forward. > > The distinction between forwarding and bouncing for me is the same as in > pine -- bounce means to simply re-email the mail to the final > destination, > whereas forward means to encapsulate the original email as an attachment, > or enclose the email inside a new email with a (fwd) subject line, and > additional headers. > > -Dan
Well, to some, "Bounce" means to hit a hard surface and then spring back the other way. But I don't think there was any ambiguity in the original discussion, because we were talking about MTA behavior. If you want to talk about basketball or mail clients or Majordomo or forwarding, then the term 'bounce' might have another meaning. In MTA context, a "bounce" is well defined: http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Bounce_message I'm picky about this one because it can make a big difference for joe-job victims. If your server "bounces" messages addressed to invalid users (which was suggested by the person I originally replied to), then you're creating a problem by generating DSN messages which flood joe-job victims. If your server's rejecting the messages, then the remote MTA software might still create a DSN, but hopefully most ratware running through a proxy doesn't bother to try notifying the bogus sender address that the spam wasn't delivered. It's easy to set up a mail system that bounces instead of rejects messages with invalid addressees, especially if you have SpamAssassin installed on a system which relays the mail to another server for final delivery. Not an uncommon setup, especially on this list, and there are people who aren't aware of the distinction. Apologies for the pedantry, hopefully someone will find this educational and configure their gateway MTA to reject mail addressed to invalid users, instead of trying to relay to the final delivery server and then bouncing when it is refused. -- snowjack(a)fastmail.fm
