Re: [exim] Removing a wildcard address

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 11:20:56 -0500, Ben Giddings <bg-exim@???> wrote:
> On Jan 27, 2005, at 02:58, Michael Dominok wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 22:57, Mike White wrote:
> >> Ben Giddings wrote:
> >>> Now, one of the addresses I use has started being nothing but spam,
> >>> so
> >>> I want any email sent to that email address to be bounced. I think I
> > If you _bounce_ it you will most propably molest innocent users whose
> > eMail-addresses have been hijacked by some spammer/bot.
> > It is sensible to _reject_ at SMTP time or do the next best thing.
> > That's what Mike suggested: Silently drop the crap.
>
> Believe me, nobody who has this address is an innocent user, I think
> there's a decent chance that if I bounce the mail, they'll remove me
> from their lists, but I don't think they'll remove me if I ask, or fill
> out forms or whatever.
>
> I do really want to bounce the email -- to make it clear that that
> address doesn't exist.

No, you want to deny the mail at SMTP time. That gets a ''win' either
way - if a genuine MTA is sending the mail, it will deliver a
notification to the genuine sender. If it's a spambot and the from
address was forged, it will ignore you.

This is well-known best practice, and easy to implement in your RCPT
ACL with the 'deny' verb.

'Accept-then-bounce' is pretty much never the right thing to do.

Peter