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Re: mimic a unknown user bounce

2005-01-24 16:58:14
You've ACCEPTED the entire message by the time procmail sees it.

This is the politically correct and infuriating reason to never send
bounces from procmail. Although it is an extremely bad idea to bounce
spam for the aformentioned reasons, I can think of other good uses for
generating bounces:

* Let someone I know know I don't want to talk to them without being too
  rude. (sorry about the grammar ;)
* I don't want to receive email from a certain group of people at *this*
  email address. It's impossible to educate the clueless other than the
  hard way.
* I'm trying to get off a mailing list, the unsubscribe is broken and
  the owner is obnoxious by doing nothing about it.
* Minor chance that some business whos mailings I no longer want reacts
  to bounces instead of polite requests. Hey it's also much faster to
  bounce than to send a personal email requesting removal. If they're
  any good, removal is automatic.

In all cases due care has to be taken to only bounce legitimate email.

To send a 
bounce back, you're going to run some process to mimic the bounce and 
submit it to the MSA, which will queue it up for the MTA to deliver (which 
may entail it being in the queue for a while),

Unless I have my own mailserver I'm therefore forced to fake it, and
it's done as you say. Unfortunately the procmail community is rather
hostile to this idea and no ready-made bounce recipes are available so I
made my own. I haven't released it because so far it's only a
quick'n'dirty job which would need too much adaptation.

Volker

-- 
Volker Kuhlmann                 is possibly list0570 with the domain in header
http://volker.dnsalias.net/             Please do not CC list postings to me.

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