Re: [exim] Heads up?

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Author: Matthias Waffenschmidt
Date:  
To: Alan J. Flavell
CC: Exim users list
Subject: Re: [exim] Heads up?
Hi,

On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 03:14:45PM +0000, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> Another class are role aliases of a kind which we don't actually use
> as sender addresses, but which are used as first-point-of-contact
> addresses for enquiries (and normally are forwarded to a few folks who
> take turns to answer). Here again the localparts tend to be ones that
> are faked as senders by spammers, and thus get quite a body of
> collateral bounces aimed at them.
>
> It seems to me quite reasonable to respond to these kinds of bounces
> with a 5xx saying that this address does not send mail and therefore
> bounces to it are rejected, in just an analogous way as for localparts
> which don't exist and thus get 5xx unknown user response to the
> offered "bounce". Comments?


I do something similar but have encountered two problems:

An increasing number of misconfigured mail systems do not use an empty
envelope sender for delivery status reports, so it is hard/impossible
to recognize these mails as delivery status reports and act
accordingly.

Some legimate mails that are not delivery status reports are sent with
an empty return path. E.g. RIPE sends such mails to notify people when
there was a change to the RIPE database. I tried to figure out that
this is a bad idea and non-RFC-compliant behaviour, but unfortunately
they did not see point...

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