On Thursday 20 June 2002 17:45, David W. Tamkin wrote:
You're better off. It's one thing to refuse spam during the SMTP
dialogue, but once that has closed and a bounce notice would be
addressed to the envelope sender rather than to the owner of the
SMTP sending process, it does no good and can do some harm.
I know, that's why I want Sendmail go generate a "go away with your
spam" while the connection is still open, not afterwards. I
understand how to filter mail through procmail, decide that it's spam
and generate some auto-reply that effectively is a bounce, but that's
not what I want because of the reasons you mention here.
Interesting but somewhat sad story you told, btw, about bounces going
on for 2 years... You should think an ISP was intelligent enough to
add some X-Loop-headers to bounce-messages...
As to why it doesn't work, perhaps you're actually using Smail (or
another MTA that doesn't care about the exit code of the LDA, or
about the exit code of a program called from an alias or in a
.forward file) rather than true Sendmail. In any case, since it is
a violation of SMTP to pretend to accept a message while actually
droppping it on the floor, I'm all for refusing spam during the
SMTP dialogue, but once your smtpd has accepted the message,
bouncing it afterward to the apparent envelope sender is
counterproductive against spam.
I completely agree with you there. That's why I wanted procmail to to
generate an exitcode and quit, because I assumed that Sendmail would
pick this up while still talking to the MTA on the other side of the
line and tell it that it couldn't deliver the message. And I still
assume this is possible. As for Smail, I checked and we really use
the genuine Sendmail, version 8.9.3. Anyway, asked our postmaster
about this, I hope she comes up with a brilliant idea :)
Greetings,
Hans
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