Re: [NTLK] [OT -- for sure] Spam?

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:16 AM, Joost van de Griek<gyorpb@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/22 Morgan Aldridge <morgant@makkintosshu.com>:
>
>> Yes, it is much easier to do that and while it does use some bandwidth
>> to try to reject each of those messages, it's better than letting them
>> go into a black hole, esp. if you have to then waste processing power
>> running them through spam & virus filters.
>
> But most spam is sent from forged addresses. Don't respond to it, not
> even with a rejection notice when the recipient doesn't exist. Please.
>
> If you've ever had a spammer use your mail address as a sending
> address, you'll know why.

Sorry, I should have clarified "it's better [for our type of business]
than letting them go into a black hole". We've been an Internet
retailer for a very long time and try to keep it very personable, so
our customers tend to correspond directly with particular employees.
Employees come and go, we occasionally change email address and miss
redirections, etc. To keep our small company from losing long-time
customers, we bounce email so that customers can know who to contact
(we have custom bounce messages).

You're entirely correct that much of the bounced messages are
spammers, but blacklists weed out much of that. I'd love to use
graylisting (bouncing temporarily and asking the sender to resubmit in
15-45 mins; very effective against spammers when used in conjunction
with blacklists) so that we could get rid of even more spam, but when
15 minutes minutes could cause a customer's order to not go out the
day they expect, we just can't afford to do it.

There are numerous tradeoffs that every admin, esp. mail server
admins, have to take into account. My example is what our company has
had to do to limit the amount of spam our employees get and allow them
to do their job more productively. We try to prevent many methods
spammers take advantage of so there's less spam out there, but
unfortunately we do help contribute to bounce spam (as many, if not
most, mail servers do).

My explanation was definitely not a best-practice example, but an
example of some of the steps that many mail servers go through before
they even accept a message. It's becoming a lot of work to even save
the server from doing the ton of work required to filter spam &
viruses, let alone just send & receive email. {Sigh.}

Morgan Aldridge

---
morgant@makkintosshu.com
http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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