{SPAM} Emails Not Bouncing

[Matt Kettler]

At 04:03 PM 5/10/2004, NateDog wrote:
>I've been watching my mail server and all of a sudden I noticed it wasn't
>bouncing emails or sending notifications back to the senders of viruses and
>such.  The reason I need this on is because some customers that I'm not
>aware of yet and haven't added to the whitelist may come through as spam.
>So I need it to bounce back and tell them that it was thought of as spam and
>to contact me.  Then I add them to the whitelist.  The problem is it's not
>bouncing or sending notifications.  I tested it myself with a test virus and
>it sees the virus and quarantines it but it never sends a notice back to me
>the sender but it does send to the local postmaster.


Ok first things first. Spam and Virus response mechanisms are completely
separate things. Do not attempt to test spam bouncing by sending test
viruses. Test spam scanning with GTUBE strings from www.spamassassin.org.
(And be careful if you use the auto-whitelist, as the address that sends
the GTUBE will end up blacklisted)


Second: spam bouncing is intentionally difficult to configure, because it's
a dangerous mis-feature which should be removed from MailScanner. Several
users complained, claiming they need it, in spite of the fact that it
creates a tool that can be used to DoS other networks. Thus, as a
compromise, Julian made it difficult to enable to prevent you from trying
to use it without understanding that it's dangerous. Read the config files
closely, there are several things you need to do to make this work.

If you require bouncing, you really should not be using MailScanner. You
need to use a tool which can issue a SMTP layer rejection. MailScanner
can't do rejects, and post-delivery bounces of spam are dangerous.

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