Re: [Exim] ACL to verify recipient

> [1] Whether there's _really_ any benefit in denying the spammers this
> bit of additional information isn't something I'd want to argue over:
> folks are welcome to conclude it's not worth worrying about, and
> that's fair enough: I'm not exactly _worried_, but I'm still
> sufficiently crabby that I prefer not to hand spammers information
> which might help them to do their work more effectively.

Not to start an argument, but simply to put my 2 cents in... Plus, I want to make
sure I "do the right things." You can TIOLI (Take It Or Leave It). ;)

I think that helping spammers clean up their address lists is not a terrible
thing; it might even be a good thing. They are going to (try to) spam anyway. In
my mind, the question is, how much of other people's resources (internet
bandwidth, processor time, and so forth) do they use when doing it? If they only
have to make one sweep to gather their information, and don't repeatedly bang on
invalid addresses, seems to me they would use less total bandwidth? I could be
wrong, and welcome rational discourse on the idea. Anyone have any hard data,
either way?

Anyway, when evaluating a scheme for its affect on spammers, I suggest applying
dispassionate logic, rather than passionate emotion, in an effort to minimize
their impact on our collective resources. I hate spam as much as the next guy,
but the REASON I hate spam is that it steals resources. It is a form of theft,
because we all end up having to buy more bandwidth/processing power/etc. than
otherwise necessary to support our legitimate activities. The fact that spam is
annoying is actually beside the point.

This is one reason I love RBLs! With a simple (resource cheap) DNS query, we can
reject lots of spam, before actually downloading any of it onto our servers. (10
Q, RBL-makers!)

Jim Roberts
Punster Productions, Inc.