Rejoining the list after a week off for a conference (where I gave a nice
talk on spam issues, among other things) let me add that while I doubt
we can get rid of bounces -- no well designed software system drops traffic
on the floor without informing the interested parties (except if that is
part of the design, as in UDP) -- but we can make them easier to handle
for honest mailing lists.
This could be done with an authenticated errors-to header which provides
a common, authenticated point for all bounces to be sent to and collected,
so the mailing list manager can get one consolidated report of all problems,
ideally in a nice parseable mime multipart format or even an XML table.
Why is this useful in the fight against spam? One of the key elements in
the fight against spam is sadly, the fight against bad spam-blockers. People
who send mail need to know when their mail has been blocked so they can
fix the problem. At the same time, sites don't wish to spend a lot of
resources sending out thousands of bounce replies to spams.
Thus if somebody who hosts a mailing list can provide an authenticated
address for delivery of combined reports -- with perhaps a different
token-containing address for each mailing they send out, or just a requirement
that the in-reply-to header be accurate on the errors -- they can get
reliable information on whether their mail is delivered, and work to fix
problems, all with low overhead to them and the net.
This has the advantage of being implementable in an incremental way. Getting
a certified (not X.509, PLEASE!) error address is a voluntary act for list
managers interested in the most reliable lists. Spammers are welcome to try
it too, but it just makes them easier to track down.
And of course, old MTAs will not send errors to the address, so you must
handle both, but slowly the volume would move to the consolidated format.
You still need bounces on individual mail, but you can eventually insist
that high volume mail use the high volume error reporting system.
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