On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> Erm, I'm sorry!?!? Do you run anything even remotely approaching a reliable
> mail service? do you claim to? A human should look at bounced bounces and
> try and deal with them (which may be deleting them if they are spam, but
> which may be misconfiguration errors, which can be fixed, if they are not)
Unfortunately, the world is not ideal. Some sites feel that they cannot
afford the manpower to do this. The balance has now been forced so far
in one directory by the $%^!&*( spammers.
I used to look at every failed bounce. Nowadays, I have
ignore_bounce_errors_after set to 12h, and I try to look at least once a
(working) day. I would estimate that it is only about once very couple
of months that there is a message which is *not* a spam-caused bounce to
a bad address.[*] Any these hosts are pretty lightly loaded (only about 30K
messages a day). A site with millions of messages per day is going to
find it hard to keep up with all the failed bounces.
---------------------------
[*] Yes, my ACL does verify recipients. The failed bounces are mostly
caused by (a) autoreplies to spam, (b) delay and bounce messages caused
by spam to real local users who have forwarded their mail to somewhere
with a harsher spam-rejection policy.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
