On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 10:38:11AM -0500,
Dean Brooks <dean@???> is thought to have said:
> What is the list's feeling of rejecting recipients at time of receipt
> versus sending bounce messages? Specifically, I'm interested in
> larger Exim sites that handle a lot of mail.
All of the sites I've built reject at SMTP time. Especially now with virus
infected emails and spam that have bad envelope senders being as common as
they are. I don't need that crap frozen on my relays. I'd rather it be
someone else's problem.
> Both Yahoo and AOL seem to now send bounces instead of immediate
> rejection of invalid addresses, which is somewhat surprising, as I
> believe they both used to do immediate rejections.
Neither Yahoo or AOL has ever done this. At least not in the several years
I've managed large mailing lists with subscribers at both sites. Hotmail
does however.
> Any insight as to why AOL/Yahoo do their mail the way they do? I would
> assume that they must know what they're doing given the sheer scale
> of their operations, and this issue must have been a hot topic at their
> organizations in the past.
Yahoo runs qmail on their inbound relays. AFAIK accepting and then bouncing
is how qmail handles things by default (and I'm not even sure it can be
configured to do otherwise).
AOL runs a custom mail setup. I believe one of the reasons they do
things like they do is so they can extensive spam filtering (including body
checks, etc) on their inbound mail before deciding to pass it along to their
users.
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Tabor J. Wells twells@???
Fsck It! Just another victim of the ambient morality
