Hans followed up,
| I know, that's why I want Sendmail go generate a "go away with your
| spam" while the connection is still open, not afterwards.
... but found that procmail doesn't come into the picture until after it's
closed:
| Then I investigated it a little closer. I telnetted to port 25 and
| typed the message manually. When it was time to type the "."-line, I
| expected Sendmail to complain about permission, but no: "message
| accepted for delivery" was what I got. But I did get a bounce!
| Unfortunately not while I was connected to Sendmail, but at the
| address I had specified in the "mail from:" line. Which is usually
| forged in spam...
The proof was in the pudding.
| 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.
I've heard that there are MTAs that can consult with per-user filter rules
(perhaps not as fancy as what procmail can do, but at least with some rules)
before giving an SMTP response code. At least then the bounce notice goes to
the owner of the SMTP sending process rather than to the envelope sender, and
while it still does no good (the spammer or relayer will ignore it), at least
it will do no harm.
| 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...
That's not what happened. Let me explain again. The mail I got right away
when I reopened the account after two years was new spam, just sent that day,
to an address that had been invalid for two years. For two years all the mail
sent to that address had bounced, but the spammers were still sending to it.
I offer that as evidence that bounce notices do not get spammers to leave an
address alone. If they removed invalid addresses from their lists, then in
two years of bounces they'd have given up sending to that address. Sellers of
spam target lists brag that all the addresses are "verified" or "valid" but
that's just another lie from a group known to be liars.
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