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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