Re: [Exim] Feature Request - SOA email address

Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I snipped the bit about hostmaster
> contacts, because I wanted to discuss auto-notification in general.

Auto-notification (as well as auto-responders) are, in my books,
another evil idea dreamed up in a time where the very very occassional
virus or spam was all the WHOLE internet got to see. These days they
just don't make any sense and as a rule generate more rubbish than
the 1 out of 10,000 'genuine' address you DO want to notify.

By all means setup policies to reject 'blacklisted' addresses, that
is your right as postmaster. BUT do it at SMTP time and _not_ as a
seperate delivery. Why? The amount of time I've seen 'auto replies'
and such like respond to forged addresses or mailer-daemon@ and so
on is utterly massive (its aabout 40% of the tens of thousands of emails
postmaster gets). Not to mention the fact that you often have a high
risk of responding to an address which then autoresponds back to you
and a huge mail loop kicks off.

> Currently, I notify the return-path on a sender blacklist, and the
> postmaster@[ip.add.re.ss] or postmaster@???
> on a host blacklist.

Bad! Bad! Bad! Reject the address at SMTP time and let the sending host
decide on where your 'blacklisted' response is sent (seeing as it has
potentially more valid idea of who the sender was).

> whois is the wrong place for auto-notifications, because it's against the
> whois terms and conditions to a) do auto-lookups, and b) send automatic
> mail to the contacts listed within, I believe.

I personally believe any form of auto-notification (done outside
of SMTP convos), is, as a rule going to cause you pain and agro in the
long run).

> Oh, totally agreed. I think I'm going to snip the rest of this, because
> I didn't intend for my message to be a discussion about the SOA contact
> address.

;-)

D.