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Is bouncing bad? (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I do AV/Anti-spam for ~ 250,000 folk. Many of my e-mail addresses are also plastered all over the 'net, so I get plenty of these bounces too.
Still, from my perspective, mail must *not* get lost. Failure to deliver a message to it's recipient must *always* generate a bounce message (i.e., an SMTP 5xx error).
Why? Because I don't trust anti-virus software to always do the right thing. I don't trust anti-spam software to always do the right thing. I don't trust *BLs and local block lists to
Re:Is bouncing bad? (Score:1)
I fail to see how an automated message saying "A message you didn't send to someone you don't know couldn't be delivered" is useful.
Re:Is bouncing bad? (Score:1)
It's not. And if you've got an algorithm that can determine when to silently drop mail on the floor with no false positives, I'm all ears. But RFC 2821, s4.2.5 is quite clear on an MTA's responsibilities after it accepts a message. I don't think picking and choosing which bits of an RFC to implement is a good idea.
Yes, 2821 is in need of an update to deal with today's In
Re:Is bouncing bad? (Score:1)
If you can detect that the message contains a virus, don't send the virus back. If you can detect which virus the message contains, you can tell whether the virus spoofs e-mail addresses. If it does, don't even send a bounce.
I gather from the fact that so many of these bounce messages say "Your message tested positive for Sobig" that both points are actually possible — and pratical.
Re:Is bouncing bad? (Score:1)
Doesn't work if you're trying to save cycles for wanted mail, and rejecting messages based on attachment types, or other content (e.g., the presence of web bugs).
To be specific, consider three sites, A, B, and C. B has the virus, and is sending mail to C, with forged headers that look like it came from A.
If C refuses to accept the message (SMTP 5xx), it's B that generates the bounce message to A. The mail logs at B shoul
Of course bouncing due to viruses is bad! (Score:1)
If C accepted the message and silently refused to deilver it then why would B retry? That makes no sense.
As Schwern pointed out the anti-virus vendors do know which virus is which and they do know which ones spoof sender addresses so of course they shouldn't bounce those ones back to the 'sender'. They should simply say '200 Hmm Yummy' and do nothing more.
But I have an even simpler rule ... Never generate a bounce response when a virus is detected. Any virus. Ever. By all means have your virus scan
Schwern != chromatic (Score:2)
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Re:Schwern != chromatic (Score:1)
Yes, I realised my mistake about 3 seconds after pressing submit (and hoped you wouldn't take offense).
And certain high ranking politicans have been known to say potatoe.
Re:Schwern != chromatic (Score:2)