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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • Spam bounces (Score:2)

    by vsergu (505) on 2003.07.15 13:19 (#22123) Journal
    If I'm sending mail, I want to know if it's not delivered. That's not always going to happen, I realize, but there are ways that mail servers are supposed to behave to make it more likely.

    Servers that send bounces in response to (what may be) spam are far better than servers that erroneously decide a message is spam and summarily blackhole it without a bounce or any indication to the sender (or recipient, for that matter) that something's wrong. Spam filtering is not perfect -- some systems are very far from it -- and making e-mail less reliable than it already is doesn't help.

    Now, if you're talking about virus scanners that send bounces, even when the virus is known to be one that forges the return address, I agree with you that they're stupid.
    • They are sending responses to spam. No ifs or buts, it's spam. They even include the spam to prove it's spam. Some even reply with a SpamAssassin header style ****SPAM**** just to be sure.

      The problem is more that most of the ISPs that are sending these bounces haven't been configured to check for spam mail. I **KNOW** spam filtering isn't perfect, I work alongside Matts [perl.org] at MessageLabs [messagelabs.com], although Matt's spam teams efforts are about as near perfect as you can get at the moment.

      Maybe you are lucky enough no

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