Re: [Exim] permanent failure for spam

* Ron McKeating <R.J.Mckeating@???> [2003-11-05 13:58]:
> Now it seems that btinternet are doing spam filtering at the smtp
> transaction and if it identifies a spam it breaks the connection with a
> defer. Is this normal? we are thinking of setting up exiscan to do this
> to emails with big spam scores but we were planning to do a deny, eg a
> 550 permanent error. The way bt are doing it, the email sits in our
> queue for 8 days and we constantly re-attempt to deliver it.

I'd consider this not to be "nice" behaviour to other members
of "the internet".

> What do others do, should it be a defer or a permanent failure ?

I'd say this _has to be_ a permament failure as the RFCs say,
defer means that a subsequent delivery attempt of the same
message with the same envelope etc. "may" succeed and therefor
the sending site should try to deliver the message later again.

It seems this is definitetly not the case if running e.g. Spamassassin
at SMTP time which will return the same score (besides upgrades,
etc.) for the same message causing a defer until the end of
retry times of the remote site.

For me, this behaviour is just a sign for one more anti-spam
solution which is causing more bad than good. :-(

Dominik