Spam bounce message

[Rose, Bobby]

But the bounce is really a message back stating that you won't accept it
and not a rejection.  It's not a Mailer-daemon message sending the
message back with a 55x REJECT message.  What this might to is if the
reject message looks like a undeliverable and is returned to a valid
address, then it's possible that that return address will auto remove
the rejected address (I know that they are list servers that do this.
If the message is the bounce message, then it would require a human on
that end to remove the address.  Also if they see that it's not an
undeliverable and is a bounce message some anti-spam software they can
attempt to flood your system with the idea that they will overwhelm it
forcing you to disable the spam-checking to clear your queues.  Yeh
you'd most likely block them completely but that won't do much for the
spam they pumped into your system.

Don't get me wrong, the bouncing is great.  This is just a discussion to
determine if such a feature is warranted. 



-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Field [mailto:mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK] 
Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 9:44 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Spam bounce message


At 23:32 28/09/2002, you wrote:
>Yeh but what I mean is that people have asked before if Mailscanner can

>reject a SPAM message

Which is why I wrote the "bounce" action in the first place.

I think I'm missing your point or something...

>  and though this is the MTA's job, this would be a
>way to give those people who want to reject the ability to do it from 
>Mailscanner.  True it's not a real reject but it does give the 
>appearance.
>
>Also my experience has been that users never read the reasons for a 
>rejection or bounce. Yeh it can help a postmaster, but just getting a 
>user to talk to their email admin is a task even with a rejection or 
>bounce message tells them to.  What they tend to do is call the person 
>they are trying to email and say they can't email them even though the 
>bounce message tells them to talk to their email admin.  The recipient 
>then believes it a problem their email account and you have to get 
>involved.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Matt [mailto:hciss at HCIWS.COM]
>Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2002 3:12 PM
>To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>Subject: Re: Spam bounce message
>
>
>If the SMTP server the spammer connected to accepted the message it was

>already marked quite likely as valid unless they used an open relay. 
>Usually the return address on a SPAM does not work anyway though.  
>Also, just in case of a false hit you would want an explanation to a 
>legitimate sender.
>
>Matt
>
> > I've been playing with this in 4.0 and was wondering... Wouldn't it 
> > better for MS to bounce back the message in such a way that it 
> > appears
>
> > to be a Mailer-Daemon rejection message?  Basically making it appear

> > to have come from the MTA?  I wouldn't think spammers are going to 
> > look that closely at the header and see that it's not a real bounce.

> > If the bounce message appears to be a rejection then "maybe" and I 
> > do mean maybe, the address would get removed from their list.

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ