I have to ask this again and forgive me if it's a stupid question, but...
Is it _absolutely_ necessary to bounce back the entire message body,
rather than just status and delivery data?
As a postmaster I can see message delivery details but not bodies and
can diagnose just about anything. The idea of allowing a mail server
to generate an entirely new message seems anachronistic at best,
dangerous at worse. I do think most people keep an "outbox" today...
10 years ago, maybe not, but please... even my cell phone stores the
last many messages I've sent from it.
We process here a fair number of messages that are bounced in as
their primary means of delivery. If message bodies weren't thrown
back too, spammers could not exploit this back door.
At 7:24 -0400 4/8/03, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Vernon Schryver wrote:
> A bigger issue is that no one has shown that bounces are a significant
spam problem. The talk about fixing bounces amounts to individual
demonstrations of problem solving powers and has little or nothing to
> do with solving the spam problem.
I think the problem is rather that forged return addresses make people
reluctant to use otherwise attractive methods for spam control. A content
based spam detector that had a 1% false positive rate might be acceptable
if senders were informed that their message had been rejected, but not if
their message were dropped on the floor. After all, a dropped message (in
addition to being an RFC violation) could lead to social awkwardness or
financial loss much more readily than a rejected message. And we already
reject many messages for virus content, size, invalid address, etc -
people know to try another channel if they get a rejection.
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