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Bernard Massot (bmassot@???) said, in message
<20030718083516.GB680@???>:
>
> > >>Hi i am using Exim 3.35 (debian woody) with amavis-ng and
> > >>spamassassin.know what i want to is that every mail wich is tagged as
> > >>spam is replied to the sender with a standard text where the sender is
> > >>asked to resend his message if it isnt spam with a subject like
> > >>foo-nospam.the reply is no problem but how can i set up a filter in exim
> > >>that messages with such a subject aren't catched by the spamassassin
> > >>director?
> > >
> > >
> > >Don't do this.
> > >
> > >A lot - and I mean a lot - of spam is sent out with forged addresses
> > >in the envelope sender.
> >
> > Yes but many mails comming from companies such as reseller request or
> > sth. are tagged as spam because the dont follow the rules i want to send
> > them back the spamassassin result and give them a possibility to resend
> > their message.
>
> You should increase your threshold. But don't reply to spam because most
> of spam mails use a forged From: adress, and if it's not forged, the
> spammer would know you received his mail and would send even more spam
> to you.
I can see both sides to this argument. As a University, we are likely to
handle lots of legitimate mail from obscure places which aren't set up
properly. The RBLs are by far our single best metric for stopping spam.
If, on the basis of an RBL rule, we dropped mail on the floor without a
bounce then there's a reasonably good chance we'd lose prospective students,
and that's MONEY to those on high. Similarly, if we insisted that the RBL
listing must be corroborated by other filter output, we'd let 2-3 times as
much spam through, and this would not be acceptable to our users. If we
didn't have a bounce message, we probably wouldn't be allowed by the Uni
authorities to offer a filtering service.
So, while I know full well that most of the bounces we send will either go
nowhere or to innocent third parties, I still have to send a bounce message.
I suspect this is the case for quite a lot of places. We're stuck in the
middle and bouncing is necessary for the 0.001% of cases where it does the
right job!
Cheers,
Alun.
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Alun Jones auj@???
Systems Support, (01970) 62 2494
Information Services,
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
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