On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 17:25 Europe/London, lstewart(_at_)acm(_dot_)org
wrote:
This discussion leads me, in a roundabout way, to a topic about which I
am confused. Should mail to invalid recipients be rejected or merely
discarded? If mail senders are legitimate, then rejecting bad mail
makes
sense. It helps folks who have made typos, of which I have made my
share.
However for spammers, I have not heard, or perhaps not understood, the
argument. My own inclination is to silently accept such things as my
small
part in the task of making spamming uneconomic.
There's lots of arguments on both sides of the fence for 5xx'ing
invalid addresses or spam. I'm beginning to think that 5xx'ing spam
makes the spammers evolve faster (they know their open relay spam is
being blocked so they move on to open proxies), and so I think you
should only 5xx unknown users, and accept caught spam. But I don't
believe you can silently junk spam either - you have to either
quarantine it or filter it to a folder. That way if there's a false
positive it can be retrieved, and even the sender can be notified that
there was a temporary problem that they may need to fix (especially if
its a blacklisting).
But I'm still not entirely 100% on the above, especially in the face of
Striker or AOL - that's just too much spam to quarantine.
Matt.
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