Spam and bounces - how do you handle it?

Neil Joseph Schelly neil at jenandneil.com
Fri Feb 9 09:36:21 EST 2007


I'm looking for some advice from any fellow mail administrators on the list.  
The problem I'm looking to resolve is not even one that I am sure is a 
"problem" persay, but it's the handling of bounce messages in response to 
spam.

We run a lot of lists that have a lot of addresses, sometimes dynamically 
generated (for confirmation email tokens for example), some software 
interfaces (like making requests of a mailing list application), etc.  As 
anything, these addresses do get a lot of spam.

Sometimes that spam comes to addresses that don't exist, so the message 
bounces.  I think I could curb that by maintaining a list of valid addresses 
or at least regular expressions that closely-enough resemble valid addresses 
and rejecting that email before accepting it.  I think this is only a small 
part of the bounced spam that gets sent out though.

Often, we get spam to list help or list administration addresses and when the 
mailing list software scans the message for commands, it essentially bounces 
the message letting the sender know the message wasn't parsable as commands 
or that those commands aren't allowed.  Often, we get spam to list publishing 
addresses, but on closed lists, these will be bounced with messages like 
"only subscribers may post."

Ultimately, I get a number of complaints by way of SpamCop - a couple every 
month or two anyway - that say I'm spamming.  Even though I'm not the 
originator of the spam and I'm sending valid bounces, even if back to false 
senders, they consider that lazy administration.  I'm not a particularly big 
fan of SpamCop for policy decisions like this and I really don't know how 
much weight they carry with things like that anyway, but I wanted to know how 
others may have coped with this.
-N


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