Spam Actions

[Jim Levie]

On Tue, 2002-09-10 at 14:36, Julian Field wrote:
> I'll take a look, that would be a useful feature.
> I'll need to put the from into the to, and set the from to <>, then deliver
> the message.
> What should I put in the message?
>
> At 17:32 10/09/2002, you wrote:
> >Is there a way to reject/bounce instead of deliver/store/delete a message?
> >It would be nice if it would make the return address <null> or <> so it
> >would not bounce back or go to the admin account either.  That way the
> >sender would know it had bounced.
> >
> >Also, is there a way to get mailscanner to run the ordb.org and/or
> >bl.spamcop.net test on all the servers that were in the delivery chain?  The
> >headers would need to be parsed to do this I guess.
> >
While we are on this subject...

It would seem to me that I should be able to tell MailScanner to not
invoke SpamAssassin if a message fails one or more RBL checks. And I'd
like to bounce the message in that case, like above, with a bounce text
identifying the RBL(s), something like what the dnsbl feature does in
sendmail.My logic is that if it came from a black listed site that I
haven't explicitly white listed, there's no point in examining it
further. Just bounce the sucker.

I'm not sure that it makes sense to check all of the MTA's that handled
the message. It does make sense to me to provide a mechanism to skip my
relay servers (almost all of my mail servers that are using MailScanner
have one or more relay servers outside of a firewall), and I've modified
MailScanner to skip those (specified via a config option). So now
working towards a mod that will generate a sendmail dnsbl type bounce as
soon as a site is identified as being black listed.

For plain and simple spam, i.e., high SpamAssassin scores, I doubt that
it worthwhile to expend the network resource on a bounce. The sender is
unlikely to be collecting mail or doing anything with it. And if they
are it is very possible that bouncing spam might just help the spammer
in verifying good email addresses. Returning a bounce for a black list
result does make sense to me. Some poor user at an ISP or organization
that's been black listed ought to be notified as to why his/her email
didn't go through.


--
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The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed RedHat
   Jim Levie                                 email:
jim at entrophy-free.net