On Tue May 24 2005 13:06, Ned Freed wrote:
On Mon May 23 2005 22:05, Markus Stumpf wrote:
No MTA that
I know of sends bounces to some random address instead of the envelope
sender addresses (which would of course be misdirected).
Not MTAs perhaps, but some "vacation"-like programs do so. Anybody who
has ever received an "I'm out of the office" message after posting to a
mailing list is the victim of such a program (or the dingbat it operates
on behalf of, or of a list expander that isn't compliant with the Host
Requirements Standard).
I haven't seen a recent example, but there was a time when some MTAs would use
the value in an Errors-to: header field in preference to what was in the MAIL
FROM.
But of course none of this corresponds to sending bounces to a random address.
Not "random" in a mathematical sense, but in the sense of not the sender
envelope address (RFC 3834 as amended by erratum); sometimes a From field
(especially bad when there is a Reply-To field win the original message,
and it's ignored), sometimes (as you note) a non-standard "Errors-To"
field, etc. -- unpredictable from the POV of the original message sender.