Re: fyi.. House Committee Passes Bill Limiting Spam E-Mail

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000 14:21:10 -0000, "Dawson, Peter D" 
<Dawson(_dot_)Peter(_at_)emeryworld(_dot_)com>  said:
> The MX admin.. can limit the no of addressess/per outgoing mail
I'm assuming that if there's an "MX admin", that you're referring to a software
package called 'MX', and not the 'MX' DNS record - the MX DNS record doesn't
allow limiting of addresses/mail, it's just a pointer.

I am unaware of an 'MX' package.  However, note that Sendmail currently has
between 70% and 90% of the MTA market, depending on what numbers you use, and
Sendmail 8.10.2 *will* allow the *inbound* limiting of maximum addresses/mail.

In any case, there's two possibilities:

1) The MX admin is unaware of the spammer's activities - and will probably
bounce the user off the machine as soon as he finds out.  Thus, the limit
doesn't matter.

2) The MX admin is aware and approves.  Now explain to me *why* the MX admin
is going to set this limit, and annoy the person paying his salary??

Limiting the number of mails per *incoming* connection is a bit better - but
not much.  It makes sense to set it on my workstation, as any mail that shows
up with more than 1 (or maybe 2) recipients is obviously broken.  But even then,
if there's more than 1 or 2 recipeints, all the limit does is save me from
having to bounce the other bad addresses.

On a large mail hub, it's even worse - we often *legitimately* have several
hundred or even thousand recipients for our *internal* mailing lists.  And I
don;'t know of ANY software that allows tuning max recipients/message on
a per-source basis....

-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Operating Systems Analyst
                                Virginia Tech

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