On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 07:41:25AM +0200, David Saez Padros wrote:
> >suppressing bounce messages is a stupid idea; blacklisting
> >hosts for sending bounce messages is an equally stupid
> >idea (actually blacklisting is foolish anyway, for obvious
> >reasons, but inexplicably it is popular).
>
> what is really stupid is to receive each day hundreds of virus
> warning messages related to messages you never sent. Reject at
> smtp time or eat you own stupid bounces.
The difficulty here is that in the current email
architecture the only person who can detect whether a
bounce is valid is the (alleged) sender. A third-party
mail server *cannot* determine whether a given bounce is
valid or not. Dropping delivery error notifications on the
floor based on some heuristic is incorrect; refusing mail
transactions from hosts purely because they correctly
process delivery error notifications is idiotic. (I hope,
by the way, that you fully inform your users that you are
programming your mail server to discard information about
whether their mail got through or not.)
[...]
> your stuopid bounces will always end been blacklisted, or
> even better being bounced (sure you will like to receive
> that bunch of bounced virus warnings)
sigh.
Generally speaking I don't think that mail server
administrators, who I guess are the main audience of this
list, should be putting any effort into making email less
reliable. Spammers, virus authors, Microsoft etc. are
already working hard on this project and I do not think
they need any assistance.
--
``The irony of the Information Age is that it has given
new respectability to uninformed opinion.'' (John Lawton)
