Re: [exim] Proposed change to list moderation handling

--On 17 October 2006 11:20:09 +0100 John Robinson
<john.robinson@???> wrote:

> On 17/10/2006 11:10, Ian Eiloart wrote:
>> How about 9,000 autoreply messages arriving over the weekend, sticking
>> in my incoming queue for a user who's mailbox is already full of them.
>> Having removed them yesterday, there's a couple of hundred more today.
>
> I'd agree that the above is useless. It sounds like the mailing list
> software needs work; some combination of better spam checking, temporary
> blacklisting if there's a deluge, together with a vacation-style
> only-send-one cache would be useful.
>
> One list should obviously not produce thousands of these per day to one
> recipient,

Of course. The problem arises when a spammer uses one sender address to
send hundreds of thousands of emails to thousands of servers each of which
sends autoresponses of some sort. It's not just mailing lists that are a
problem here, there are all sorts of DSNs, vacation messages and so on.

> but this still doesn't mean auto-responses - properly handled
> - aren't useful.

Yes, they're useful. But they're harmful, too - unless you're certain that
they're going to a legit sender. Usually, they're not.

> Cheers,
>
> John.



--
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex