use Perl

• from: ne from_ (Score:2)

  by Juerd (1796) on 2004.05.29 15:59 (#31181) Homepage

  To know which bounces I want to keep and which I want to throw away, a while ago I thought it would be a nice experiment to see if spammers ever use the envelope from that I use. Originally, I would if I did indeed get spam on that address encode some information in the envelope from to find out how they got that information.
  
  But I have still not received a single message on that address that wasn't a bounce that I wanted to read.
  
  The mail address that I use in the headers is juerd@example.com (but with another domain), the envelope from is juerd@c4.example.com. All bounces that I receive that aren't for juerd@c4.example.com (most are for juerd@example.com, obviously), is stored in a separate folder. I'm now confident enough to send things directly to /dev/null, but this is an easy way get statistics :)
  
  There are, unfortunately, auto-replies that aren't bounces. They are sent to the address in the From: header. For that I don't really have a solution.
  

  Reply to This

  • Re:from: ne from_ (Score:2)

    by vsergu (505)

    If you send out all your mail with juerd@c4.example.com as the MAIL FROM, then that address will end up in some Received lines in some messages. Some of those messages will end up on computers that get infected with worms. Some of them will end up somewhere on the web, where the address will be harvested by spammers. So soon you'll be getting bounces to that address in response to spam and worms. I guess that means you'll have to change the address periodically.
    
    Of course there are stupid mail systems o
    • Re:from: ne from_ (Score:2)

      by Juerd (1796)

      That's what I thought, but I've been using this for over a year now and I haven't received a single unwanted message at juerd@c4.example.com yet.