No, they are not. They are a critically important part of the
robustness of email. Broad acceptance of the idea that bounces are
evil will be the last nail in the coffin of email.
Bounces are useful if they go to the person who actually sent the mail.
Those "bounces" do not - they go to an innocent bystander. Whether this
is due to inherent flaws in the SMTP protocol, sloppy management or
incorrect configuration is arguable - but the fact is that those bounces
are making the problem worse and they NEED to be eliminated.
Uh, have you heard of Swen???
Swen is NOT an example of the behaviour being discussed. Most worms
harvest e-mail addresses from the infected machine, and typically
select one of them at random as the sender. This can of course result
in the worm sending itself out as being from the "actual" owner of the
machine - however, usually this is not the case. Swen typically
pretended to be from "MS Technical Support" or something like that.
As far as I know, there is not a single worm in the wild that searches
for the "real" owner of the infected machine and *only* uses that. I
expect that practice to become more common in the future, as one way
of avoiding SPF checking, but currently this is simply not the case.
--
Fridrik Skulason Frisk Software International phone: +354-540-7400
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