On Sat, 22 Nov 2003 10:31:54 EST, "Richard O. Hammer"
<ROHammer(_at_)EarthLink(_dot_)net> said:
Is there something which prevents spammers from sending their messages
with a null reverse path in the envelope? In other words, with
MAIL FROM: <>
in the SMTP exchange?
You do that, and I'll be forced to block mail from your site, and toss your
domain at the nice guys at http://www.rfc-ignorant.org. I have better
things to do than accept mail from sites that won't accept bounce messages
back. You send the mail, it bounces, the bounce goes back with a MAIL FROM:<>
as per the RFC, and if you don't accept the bounce, then:
a) your user never learns they sent to the wrong address and it bounced.
b) the double bounce ends up in *my* inbox and I get irate.
Unfortunately, any reasonable counter measures here require you to let
things go past the DATA step:
1) Check the body of the mail to see if it's either an RFC3491/3492 style
DSN or any of the more common non-RFC format bounces (AOL, qmail, and MS
Exchange
are some of the biggies here).
2) If it isn't a bounce message but has MAIL FROM:<>, toss it. Note that
this *WILL* false-positive on some things (most notably, LSoft's Listserv
product sends confirmation requests for subscriptions with <>, specifically
so if the remote address is bad, it doesn't get a bounce message it doesn't
care about).
3) Note that I've *also* already seen spammers sending their spam inside
properly formatted bounces, specifically to work around the loophole you're
trying to create.
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