On 2007-05-02 05:28:16 -0400, Hector Santos wrote:
Here is food for thought:
I found this interesting documentation note is a "Professional Spammer"
Mass Emailer web site. Name removed to protect the ignorant.
SPAMMERX provides bounce handling capabilities such that after
an e-mail address has bounced a certain number of times,
SPAMMERX will cease sending to that address in future e-mail
campaigns. SPAMMERX does not distinguish between hard and soft
bounces but does categorize between more granular categories
of bouncebacks, including out-of-office autoreplies, mailbox
full, and user-not-found bounces. Only bounceback messages
indicating that the e-mail address is truly invalid are
actually counted as true bounces. Out-of-office autoreplies
and mailbox-full bounces are never counted as true bounces. By
default, your SPAMMERX account is set so that after an e-mail
address has bounced three times, SPAMMERX will stop sending
future e-mail campaigns to it, even if you try to send to it.
Interesting, so this Mass Mailer "Spam" service ignores 4xy/5yx and will
try at least 3 times to the same address before it does something with
the address.
My guess is that this is about maintaining the database of mail
addresses, not about sending individual messages.
For the mailing-lists which I maintain manually, I do something very
similar: If I get a bounce, I look at the reason. If its something like
"no such user" I immediately unsubscribe the address from the list; but
it's "mailbox full" or "procmail exited with unknown code 42" or
something like that I assume that the user is going to fix the problem
and unsubscribe them only if the problem persists for a few days.
So that looks like that software is actually trying to clean up the
database with reasonable heuristics.
I didn't catch well what it meant by "hard and soft bounces" and
"BounceBack Messages?" Does that main a real accept/bounce transaction
or a 5xy response? or both?
I'm not sure either. "hard and soft bounces" could be either 5xx and 4xx
respectively, or a "soft bounce" could be a "couldn't deliver for $n
hours, will keep trying" message.
"BounceBack Messages" are probably NDNs. I find this interesting,
because it means that to use this software (or at least this feature)
the spammer has to use a genuine reverse-path.
hp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | I know I'd be respectful of a pirate
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR | with an emu on his shoulder.
| | | hjp(_at_)hjp(_dot_)at |
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Sam in "Freefall"
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