Chris Johnson wrote:
Happy New Year.
You too. Gregorian New Year has passed but Chinese New Year is getting
close.
Is it possible, and if so then how, to get procmail to mimic an
unknown user bounce by the mail server?
Not well. That is better done during the SMTP dialogue; procmail comes
into the story too late, so at best it can send your imitation NDN to
the stated envelope sender of the message, which, on spam, is almost
always either an nonexistent address or that of an innocent third party.
One apparently effective but also drastic way to reduce spam seems to
be to just turn off your mail server or account for a week. I'm told
the spam drops by 90 percent.
Not likely. I had an address that bounced -- in the SMTP dialogue --
for two years and then I revived it. Spam came within three or four
hours after it was reactivated, though I had done nothing to expose it
since reviving it; it was just still on spamming lists despite two years
of bounces.
Those two years ran from July 4, 1996, to July 31, 1998. Imagine how it
would be now, 6 1/2 years later.
And it's starting to take serious CPU to get through my filter, body
searches are tough.
Dallman Ross's extensive spam-catching recipe library has almost no body
searches in it, and they're rarely invoked.
So I thought it might be helpful if an unknown user bounce could be
simulated and the mail returned as such. Don't know how much it
would help or even if. Thought it might be worth a shot though.
It would be worthless. Envelope sender addresses on spam are almost
always forged. You'd be sending the imitation NDN either to an invalid
address or to an innocent third party. In the latter case, you become a
spammer. Your idea just dumps the problem onto other people.
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