On 06 September 2002, Philip Hazel said:
> It is clear there are two very different schools of thought here. There
> are people like yourself that want to return a lot of detail to the
> client host, and then there are those who don't want to tell those
> damned spammers anything more than they have to.
Actually, in this case I'm more concerned about the message in Exim's
logs then the SMTP rejection message. I couldn't care less what Exim's
temporary rejection message to the SMTP client is; I care deeply about
what it writes in its log file.
My impression is that 1% of the general population actually reads bounce
messages, and epsilon% of spammers do. So I try to make SMTP rejection
messages fairly useful, eg.
$ nc mail.python.org 25
220 mail.python.org ESMTP Exim 4.05 Fri, 06 Sep 2002 11:45:12 -0400
mail from:<gward@???>
250 OK
rcpt to:<greg@???>
250 Accepted
data
354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself
Subject: ADV: foo
.
550-spam not wanted here
550 (subject line includes "ADV")
I rather doubt that this is going to make the minority of spammers who
obey the Utah (?) spam law suddenly stop doing so. But if it turns out
my regex for "ADV" is too liberal, and bites some innocent bystander,
both he (from the bounce message) and I (from the log message) have a
chance of figuring out what went wrong.
Greg
--
Greg Ward <gward@???> http://www.gerg.ca/
I just read that 50% of the population has below median IQ!
