Julian Mehnle writes:
Apart from that, I'd of course agree that any distinction between
originating and forwarding spam is effectively meaningless. (Otherwise
every spammer could just claim to be "forwarding" their spam, and there
would be no way to disprove them.)
Two real-life (i.e., not hypothetical or made-up) cases where the
distinction is not meaningless:
1. When I am acting as a forwarder, some of my forwarding users ask me
not to filter out spam before forwarding.
2. When I am acting as the destination for mail forwarded from other
services, some of my users ask me not to filter out spam that has
been forwarded.
Both these cases arise because there are some business users whose
reliance on email is so great they cannot tolerate any false positives
whatsoever, and they are willing to wade through hundreds of spams for
the one email that means a sale.
Case 1 is a problem for me because it causes me to forward spam. This
has caused me to be identified as a spam source or open relay by the
destination site.
Case 2 is a problem for me because it has caused me to identify the
forwarding site as a spam source or open relay.
While some users don't want their mail service to filter out spam,
they don't like getting spam and sometimes try to deal with the spam
problem themselves, with anti-spam software (which can wreak havoc in
the above cases) or by reporting the forwarded spam to SpamCop or
similar (which can also wreak havoc).
--
Dick St.Peters, stpeters(_at_)NetHeaven(_dot_)com
Gatekeeper, NetHeaven, Saratoga Springs, NY
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