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Re: mimic a unknown user bounce

2005-01-24 18:39:35
At 12:39 2005-01-25 +1300, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
> 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've found that even asking people to not CC one on list posts (for a lot of legit reasons, nevermind that it's MY inbox they're sending things to) raises ire with some people. Telling someone you're not interested in hearing from them isn't going to come off as anything other than rude to them. Accept it - ditch the messages.

* 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.

Heh, that rather describes some of my family members.

This if course is a wholly different type of bounce. Mailing lists I administer have informational bounces - your message was a forward of a digest posting, or you posted in HTML, etc. Inform the user so that they can take corrective action.

* I'm trying to get off a mailing list, the unsubscribe is broken and
  the owner is obnoxious by doing nothing about it.

I'd call this a rarity, but if you don't have configuration control over the MTA (i.e. you're a lowly user on a host administered by someone else who won't give you the time of day), then set up a forward to the return-path or listowner address (just make sure it isn't a list submission address, because that'd be incredibly rude to the other users of the list, and if it comes out that you're a retard who couldn't find the unsub instructions they include in a link in the messages, you're going to be a serious ass).

* 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.

Try reading the manpages or searching the list archives for "EXITCODE"

# Standard EXIT codes (but check the docs specific to your chosen MTA):
#
# EX_USAGE        64
# EX_DATAERR      65
# EX_NOINPUT      66
# EX_NOUSER       67
# EX_UNAVAILABLE  69
# EX_OSERR        71
# EX_OSFILE       72
# EX_CANTCREAT    73
# EX_IOERR        74
# EX_TEMPFAIL     75
# EX_NOPERM       77

EXITCODE=67 followed by unsetting HOST would cause your MTA to treat the message as a NOUSER. It'll not be exactly the same as a regular nouser bounce, but the situations you're citing sound like you're dealing with morons anyway, so the little differences are not likely to be significant to them.

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.

Some people believe that it's wrong to pollute. Be it the wilderness, the public roadways, a parking lot -- or the internet. Sending bounces in response to spam is sort of like taking the trash someone left on your car windshield and throwing it out on the street - you're not putting it into the mailbox of the actual spammer, you're just polluting the net everyone else is trying to enjoy or otherwise make use of. In such cases, it's better to just stuff it into the trash -- unless you can tell off the guy holding a stack of them wandering around the parking lot and mangling windshield wipers as he crams them on cars.

Sending informational _autoreplies_ to messages from recognizeable sources is a different matter.

If you're looking for something for mail admins to be hostile about, you should check out what Verizon has decided to do (blocking mail from European sources, AND performing SMTP callbacks).

---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.


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