Re: dealing with anti-spam bounces?

> I'd like to know if anybody has any good ideas for handling spam bounces.
> ie. bounce messages from my auto-responder hitting bogus addresses.
> Do I have to keep track of every spammer I've responded to and trash any
> incoming spam bounces?
> I my auto reply daemon adds headers in it's responds are any of those
> headers guarantted to be returned by the bounce message?
While there is no guarantee that an autoreply will preserve an
"X-Loop" header (spammers are notorious for ignoring the rules of
the road even in this), here's how I handle this:

First, I set these variable at the top of my .procmailrc:

NOLOOP=sakeneko(_at_)hotmail(_dot_)com   #Use a valid email address belonging 
to you
SPAMFOLDER=/dev/null          #Change this to a folder if you want to 
                               keep copies of the stuff.

Now, =BEFORE= you filter for spam, include a couple of recipes like
this:

:0
* ^FROM_MAILER
mailer.incoming

:0
* $ ^X-Loop: ${NOLOOP}
mailer.incoming

This filters out any autoresponse to a bounce sent by you, and any
mail from an "administrative" account like root, postmaster, or
sysadmin, and puts it in a separate folder called mailer.incoming
where you can deal with it appropriately.

Then, I use this recipe for filtering spam of different types:

# Generic spam filter
:0
* ^(From.|Reply-To:|Message-ID:|Received:).*[^0-9A-Za-z](camelot\.net|\
          cyberpromo\.com|\
          nancynet\.com|\
          quantcom\.net|\
          sallynet\.com)
* $ !^X-Loop: ${NOLOOP}
{
:0 c
$SPAMFOLDER

:0 c
spamtemp

:0
| (formail -rt \
    -A"X-Loop: ${NOLOOP}";\
    cat $SBDIR/junk;\
    cat spamtemp;\
    rm -f spamtemp) \
    | $SENDMAIL -oi -t
}

This recipe checks to be sure the message does not contain your 
"X-Loop" header, and adds your "X-Loop" header to any autoreply.
The "checking" portion is redundant if you have the other recipe
set up to filter this mail out before it gets to your spam filter,
but I include it just in case someone doesn't install the spam 
filter correctly.

This prevents mail loops -- your filter talking to the spammer's
autoreply address.  And I have known spammers -- ISP Internet
notorious among them -- who set up their postmaster addresses
as autoresponders.  So be ready for almost anything from them. :(

Catherine