[PLUG] Webmail server suggestions

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Thu May 6 14:40:03 UTC 2004


On Thu, 6 May 2004, Paul Johnson wrote:

> Why bother accepting it if everybody using that server is guaranteed
> to not want it?  Seems like it's more practical to just tell your
> server to give spammers the finger and tell them to piss off than
> accept their spew.

It's an interesting question. My bias is to reject it outright with an
SMTP 550 error message. That's the most standards-compliant way to do
it, and, if the sender is sending spam by mistake (fat chance, I
know), it lets him know his message didn't get delivered.

On the other hand, spambots armies now have some central coordination.
See, for example, the "Spammer zombie group behaviour" thread on the
mimedefang mailing list:

http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/mimedefang/2004-April/022003.html

In short, if you reject a message from one spambot, others will try
to deliver the message again soon thereafter. I can see it happening
in my mail logs at home. It's sick and facinating all at the same
time.

The admin is faced with a tough question: Is it better to do things
the right way and be forced to reject the same spam many times, or to
silently discard it and make the spammer think he was successful in
delivering it, reducing the strain on the mail infrastructure.

It's a no-win choice. I choose to do it the standards-based way, but I
don't have a mail server that's already swamped dealing with thousands
of inbound tcp connections, scanning every message for spam and
viruses.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>




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