North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Blocking mail from bad places

  • From: Thomas Leavitt
  • Date: Thu Apr 05 11:43:09 2007

One problem with the "bounce" solution is that for those of us with multiple domains (some of them wildcarded) mapped to our mailboxes, the volume of "backscatter" makes it a real hassle to sort out the valid bounces from the "noise". Even users with a single email address can be victimized often enough to dismiss this stuff as a form of "spam", and automatically delete it without looking; \every few months, I get pained complaints from one friend or family member or another about someone using their address to spam, and thousands of bounce messages winding up in their mailbox as a result... another major problem, in my opinion, caused by spam that is leading to email becoming more and more of an unreliable medium - even when everything works perfectly according to protocol and RFC, and a person gets a bounce message because an address is out of date or typoed or otherwise invalid, they'll never know.

Thomas



Steven Champeon wrote:
on Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 06:25:18PM -0400, John L wrote:
This technique works great to keep spam out of your mailbox.
Inline rejection is a little dangerous for mailing lists
And for anyone else who doesn't feel like jumping through your hoops.

Providing a telephone number in the bounce is an effective way to deal
with false positives.
Only if you assume that everyone who writes to you is so desperate to send you mail that they are willing to make what may be an international call in the middle of the night. I have not found that to be a very realistic assumption.

I have to agree with John here - I've been sending back 'email me at
[email protected] if this in an error' for all rejections here since 2003
or so, and can count the legit mail to postmaster I've received in that
time on one hand, maybe two; the stuff that gets rejected before the
accept postmaster default gets a different error, containing a phone
number. I've never had anyone call me there. 

Not that it bothers me much - I've done my part, I figure, and if they
aren't willing to email a postmaster or call, then <shrug>? What can I
do?

I'll add that even if everyone were willing to email/call with problems,
the hideous things that (e.g.) Exchange does to your carefully
handcrafted rejection errors are enough to cripple the least tech-savvy
of your likely audience, anyway.