> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tore Anderson [mailto:tore@linpro.no]
> Here's a quote from a discussion I had about this very
> topic with one
> of the people behind postmaster@???, a perfect example of the
> person I said would hate you above:
>
> «do you think I'm wound up about this for fun? or maybe
> it's because
> debian.org postmaster address is now basically fucking
> useless thanks
> to the combination of a) fuckwits with AV filters, and b) fuckwits
> with 550-ing afer DATA»
>
> That's verbatim, by the way.
Sounds like a configuration problem. I don't know why anyone would route
failed bounce messages to postmaster. Here they get flushed out of the
queue after a couple hours if they can't be delivered. I learned very
quickly that a failed bounce is almost always triggered by spam. It's
unlikely to contain any useful information.
I consider refusing mail at SMTP time a far better solution than the other
two options: Accepting it and then bouncing, or sending it to /dev/null.
The former creates far more backscatter spam, the latter means that sooner
or later a real message is going to get trashed and no one will hear about
it.