Author: Alan J. Flavell Date: To: Fred Viles CC: exim-users Subject: Re: [exim] Discarding a message without reason?
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Fred Viles wrote:
> Interesting. Do you really see that happening much?
On the scale of the thousands of offers of spam and malware that are
automatically rejected, no. But on the scale of nuisances which leave
mail on the postmaster's inbox for manual attention - enough to be a
nuisance and irritation, yes.
> 1. The majority of spam & malware these days is offered directly by
> spamware/malware, and as such rejection does not led to DSNs to
> anybody.
Mostly that's true; but there are enough exceptions to represent a
nuisance to the postmasters. Quite a lot of it is third-party
rejections to faked mail (collateral rejections / outscatter, whatever
you like to call it) sent by idiots who didn't have the sense to
reject it at SMTP time, but found out afterwards that they didn't like
it. Then there's the problem of users who have forwarding addresses
elsewhere.
> 3. If postmaster is a read-only address, DSNs to postmaster can be
> rejected.
Well, we've noticed that DSNs get sent to lots of localparts which,
although they're recognised addresses for *receiving* mail, are never
used as envelope senders in *sent* mail. We're slowly drifting
towards rejecting DSNs directed at those localparts.
I suppose one could consider handling postmaster in the same way, as
long as one refrains from using the postmaster address as env-sender
in outgoing mails.
