Tony Hansen wrote:
I've also seen multi-line greetings from various servers for several
years now.
I think the trend to use multi-line greeting was begun as an anti-zombie
tactic, and the valid clients were quickly fixed.
Actually, its done for legal reasons, to display the system policy as
required by certain US ECPA provisions since 1986. You always had the
ability to "sue" spammers (or anyone for that matter) for abusing of
your system. You just had to prove it with damages to make it worth the
effort. In fact, criminal attacks will get the FBI involved if can you
show $5000 in damages. (I think it has been raised to $25,000, since we
used this tax-paid "federal service" in 1999)
For example, a few years back when AOL.COM was suing spammers big time,
they were using current US laws in the books. If memory serves me right,
they began to display the following after the major case ended (I don't
specifically if it was settled or judged).
220-rly-mc05.mail.aol.com ESMTP mail_relay_in-mc5.1;
Sat, 07 Apr 2007 00:38:31 -0400
220-America Online (AOL) and its affiliated companies do not
220- authorize the use of its proprietary computers and computer
220- networks to accept, transmit, or distribute unsolicited bulk
220- e-mail sent from the internet. Effective immediately: AOL
220- may no longer accept connections from IP addresses which
220 have no reverse-DNS (PTR record) assigned.
After the case, we (Santronics) also followed suit in providing a
similar default template for our own SMTP customers.
Note: You can see AOL at a later point, expanded it to cover their rDNS
policy.
--
HLS