On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 09:47:52AM -0400, John Leslie wrote:
Misdirected bounces are a significant problem:
Can we please stop using the term "misdirected bounces" - at least here -
now and forever?
There is no such thing as a "misdirected bounce". There are only bounces
to abused and forged sender addresses. MTAs sending bounces to those
addresses are in full compliance to each and every RFC. No MTA that
I know of sends bounces to some random address instead of the envelope
sender addresses (which would of course be misdirected).
There are clueless poeple running DNSBLs like SORBS and SPAMCOP that obviously
have no idea of how mail transactions work and that you can NEVER EVER
determine at the SMTP level FOR SURE if the delivery will work.
UUCP, X.400 and a thousand of other gateways are the proof for that, as
are programs that handle user requests per email (like mailing list
managers, CRM systems, ...).
But those try to force other people to stop sending bounces at all and
thus weaken the reliability of the Internet mail infrastructure. Their
arguments are "if AOL and Hotmail managed it, why can't you?". And the
answer is really simple: Because neither AOL nor Hotmail run neither UUCP
gateways nor multihop email-gateways to satellite services like
skyfile.com (Inmarsat, Iridium and Thuraya) or others. But imagining
those kind of services is obviously beyond the limited scope of thinking
of those people.
But besides other Mail-Admins Ironport doesn't trust its own DNSBL and
doesn't use it for their customers.
\Maex
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