On 10 Apr 2010, at 14:33, John Leslie wrote:
What do folks think of
http://www.backscatterer.org/?target=backscatter
Not for me. Too much froth from the mouth there, I think.
Disclaimer: I knowingly backscatter, when I can't help it. My domain started
life and continues to this day as a catch-all, which makes it hard sometimes
not to. I'm still rethinking this seriously, but in the meantime it's not on
that list and AFAIK never has been. And even if I used fixed address, my
mailing lists would for example provide a backscatter source, with forged mail
or subscription requests, etc.
(Hopefully we agree that backscatter deserves to be avoided; but
automated blacklisting for backscatter worries me a bit...)
+1
You may be interested to know that qmail, the "Village idiot" of MTAs which is
pervaded by this problem out of the box, is jerkily progressing through to
inclusion into Debian Linux. The technical committee review consensus has
been, "Fix the backscatter problem, and we'll let it in, pending a month of
bugs." See here for the details:
http://smarden.org/pape/Debian/sid.html
What this seems to say is that the problem is different things to different
people. FTR, I'm no qmail fanboy, but people should have that choice. Some of
qmail's weird behaviour is good and desirable to others, and it's a question of
who's priorities are under consideration as to whether or not the software is
suitable. The proponents of backscatter of course argue that it discloses less
about valid recipients, when the recipient address isn't immediately rejected
if unknown.
Cheers,
Sabahattin
smime.p7s
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