RE: [exim] Is there and logical reason to reject mail from: …

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:

> On ons, 2004-10-13 at 23:18 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> >
> > Agreed. However, if we became aware (by whatever means[1]) that you
> > repudiated a bounce to postmaster at the RCPT stage, you might well
> > land up in our "unreachable domains" blacklist,
>
> how do you rationalise your response?

When I said "might well", I guess that was not a good choice of words.
What I meant to say is that it might provoke mail admins to look more
closely at the situation, as a result of which, if other factors
applied, they might decide that the site was not participating
properly in SMTP.

Suppose (for instance) that the response is "Bogus MAIL FROM",
irrespective that the addressee is postmaster. We might get provoked
into looking more closely and seeing that the same response results
for any addressee. We might then want to consider whether this is a
domain with which we need to do any business.

Suppose (for instance) some joker presents us with a faked sender
address of postmaster@??? ...

If we try callout on that, we get told at the RCPT stage that mail to
postmaster is rejected because the mailbox is over quota. It's been
like that for weeks. Maybe they never do send genuine mail out with
postmaster as the envelope-sender, but, on the basis of what we see
there, and considering other factors which come to light when we are
provoked into looking, we might draw certain conclusions.

So, the problem could have been drawn to our attention by the fact
that they repudiated a bounce to postmaster at the RCPT stage (hence I
said "if we became aware"). That wouldn't have been the sole
criterion for the listing, though.

Does that make more sense?