Re: [Asrg] Random thought

[Matt Sergeant <msergeant@startechgroup.co.uk>]

On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 17:25 Europe/London, lstewart@acm.org 
wrote:

> This discussion leads me, in a roundabout way, to a topic about which I
> am confused.  Should mail to invalid recipients be rejected or merely
> discarded?  If mail senders are legitimate, then rejecting bad mail 
> makes
> sense. It helps folks who have made typos, of which I have made my 
> share.
> However for spammers, I have not heard, or perhaps not understood, the
> argument.  My own inclination is to silently accept such things as my 
> small
> part in the task of making spamming uneconomic.
There's lots of arguments on both sides of the fence for 5xx'ing 
invalid addresses or spam. I'm beginning to think that 5xx'ing spam 
makes the spammers evolve faster (they know their open relay spam is 
being blocked so they move on to open proxies), and so I think you 
should only 5xx unknown users, and accept caught spam. But I don't 
believe you can silently junk spam either - you have to either 
quarantine it or filter it to a folder. That way if there's a false 
positive it can be retrieved, and even the sender can be notified that 
there was a temporary problem that they may need to fix (especially if 
its a blacklisting).

But I'm still not entirely 100% on the above, especially in the face of 
Striker or AOL - that's just too much spam to quarantine.

Matt.

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