Greetings. Rudd wrote:
My system sends out a "challenge" email in response to every rejected
email, and rejected mails are sent to /dev/null.
How do you know where to send it to? Many messages have faked addresses,
sending messages to those would make one part of the problem.
Of course, the only idea of the "challenge" mail is to give instructions
for a legitimate correspondent to get on my whitelist, I really don't care
whether or not spammers see my challenge email, and of course they won't.
A spammer's return address is almost never one mail can be delivered to.
I think many of them are, as you say, faked.
I admit the challenge email in the vast majority of cases eats up
bandwidth. The challenge is usually bounced back (from undeliverable
spammers' addresses and, I assume, forged spammer addresses) to my mail
server, and I send those immediately to /dev/null near the top of my
.procmailrc.
On the other hand, this whitelist system (with challenge emails sent to
anyone not on the whitelist) allows me to simply discard spam rather than
try to filter it and identify it. I find it offensive to have to look
through spam for legitimate mail. This system frees me from that.
Is the cost in bandwidth necessary to implement a challenge-response spam
block system justifiable? For the moment I think it probably is, but I
might be wrong. I would be happy to receive mail about this, although
this might be too off-topic for this list.
--
(If contacting me for the 1st time, please use "Standish" in message
subject or body.)
____________________________________________________________
procmail mailing list Procmail homepage: http://www.procmail.org/
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail