Re: [Exim] Feature Request - SOA email address

On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 12:19:09PM +0100, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> > As I've said already. Auto-notification is not only idiotic, it creates
> > more damage than good. Quite often with viruses the sender address is
>
> Slightly off-topic, but what is your (and other people's) opinion on
> auto-notification on blacklisting due to mailing bait addresses? I'm
> still falling on the side of "I'd rather send them the notification
> that they've been blacklisted", then they can ignore it or act on it
> as they wish.

No, the problem here is that the hsotmaster contact in the DNS SOA is
absolutely 100% the WRONG place to send these notification and they
should NEVER be sent there.
There were two possible locations where are suitable: abuse@ and
postmaster@. The particular domain may indicate others on a web page.
That particular IP's whois may provide another in the whois record. But
hostmaster is never the right place.

Aside from the concern that it is the wrong place to send it, if these
addresses start getting spammed to death it will make maintaining them
as reliable points of contact for valid hostmaster business nearly
impossible.

Many of us already receive several THOUSANDS of mails to postmaster@ and
abuse@ about these issues. And many orders of magnitude more actual spam
to these addresses. It isn't easy to keep that sane. Adding another few
tens of thousands to hostmaster will been 1) impossible to maintain
logistically for a lot of people, 2) extremely expensive financially -
people cost money, and people would be needed to manage it.