On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>
> > However if those addresses do exist then they _MUST_ accept valid
> > messages, from valid sources, especially when those messages are sent
> > with a null return path.
>
> "MUST" in the RFC sense, perhaps yes. But "MUST" in the sense of "You
> may not have your own policy about these things", no.
>
> If I were to follow your rule, I would have to manually look at about
> 100 bounces per day that are nowadays sent to those of my addresses from
> which I never send email. I am not prepared to waste my time doing this.
Just as a data point, (at risk of joining this troll-feeding frenzy),
we have a number of old host-based domains registered whose addresses
are already widely propagated amongst serious correspondents (e.g in
author lists for e-published papers), and for which we feel it's still
appropriate to *accept* mails, but they are nowadays never used on
outgoing mails (if attempted by a misguided client configuration, they
are re-written on the way out to a domain-based address by the MTA).
These host-based addresses are however widely forged as spam sender
addresses, resulting in large numbers of collateral bounces to many of
our users. We feel entirely justified in responding with a deny, and:
message = This address does not send mail; delivery \
reports are rejected as fakes.\n\
SORRYTEXT
Well, OK, it might be an out-of-office or vacation response or
suchlike rather than a delivery report "as such", but the bottom line
is the same.
Since our log was rotated on June 19th, we've logged 2193 such
rejections, on our departmental server alone. 2898 in the previous
full week. I really don't want the postmasters to have to inspect all
of those before discarding them. And the senders of such bogus
reports would be getting no feedback on their misbehaviour if we
didn't reject them at SMTP time (not that they seem to care, judging
from the "backscat*" listings at spambag.org).
