North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall

  • From: Majdi S. Abbas
  • Date: Tue May 18 13:13:55 2004 
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 02:26:37PM -0700, Jared B. Reimer wrote:
> This is a pretty serious flaw IMHO, if it is (in fact) true.  qmail isn't 
> the only mailer that behaves this way.  It looks like they may have tried 
> to kludge their way around this with LDAP in the case of MS Exchange, which 
> also does asynchronous bouncing of undeliverable mail IIRC.

	Quite frankly, I'm at a loss as to why anyone would wish to accept
and queue mail that they cannot deliver.  Queuing everything just allocates
disk unnecessarily and results in a lot of delayed bounce backscatter, 
almost always directed at a third party (in the common case of spoofed from: 
headers).

	Accepting everything simply because you don't wish to give away
valid addresses doesn't work; the spam bots just jabber more loudly at you.
In the past year I've had two domains joe jobbed, generating thousands of
those helpful delayed bounce messages per hour for my role accounts.

	If, after RCPT TO, you do not have a valid destination, just 
refuse it.  My role accounts thank you.

	--msa