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Re: Why spam is a problem.

2002-08-15 10:59:48
From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>

It doesn't waste their resources, because it improves the level of 
service that they see.    Giving someone immediate feedback that their 
address is invalid is far preferable to trying to send them a bounced 
mail message that will never arrive; and keeping our mail servers 
from being bogged down with bounces that will never get delivered 
helps free them up to deliver legitimate traffic.
...

That is the same sort of reasoning that spammers use to justify
their activities.

  - bounces would not bog down your mail servers, since you can discard
   or otherwise deal with bounces with no more "bogging" than you are
   spending poking at other people's systems.  This aint rocket science,
   because even the spammers that want to avoid bounces understand how
   to do that.  (Many spammers want to receive bounces to clean their
   lists, because some big ISPs and others automatically black-list
   SMTP clients after they've sent to too many bad addresses.)

  - a mechanism that could really determine that addresses are valid
   could be useful in a web page to provide immediate feedback to
   users.  The reality of MX servers, firewalls, sendmail "catch-all"
   maps, and other things make the RCPT command too unreliable to use
   for that purpose.


Vernon Schryver    vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com



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