Re: Getting Serious About the War on Spam
I used to agree with that. I thought it was irresponsible and inexcusable for any ISP to throw away mail without notifying (or getting previous approval from) either the recipient or the (alleged) sender. But, after considering the potential effect on an innocent party whose address gets forged on spam, I have reconsidered. I still hate it when I send mail that just silently disappears with no notification or explanation, but there are worse things that could happen. However, I think letting the sending server handle the notification alleviates this problem.
I have already joined the effort to clean up the net. My website is helping Project Honeypot identify email-harvesting bots. (
My SMTP server is using RBL to reject a LOT of incoming spam, so I don't have to whine about losing legitimate incoming email in a flood of spam. And it's up to the sending servers to decide whether or not to notify the sender. My guess is that legitimate servers will, and spambots won't. And if anybody either gets an erroneous notification about rejected spam that he didn't really send, or fails to get a notification when his legitimage message didn't reach me, that's the fault of the sending server, not mine.
I'm doing what I can to clean up the net. I don't need a jillion pieces of mail to convince me cleaning up the net is a good thing.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But isn't also a good idea to auto-ack the alleged senders of the spam mail since if a person gets enough of those they may be moved to clean out the zombies in their own computer (if they have any, or if they don't) become angry enough to join in the fight in a big time way? That is why I am seriously thinking about changing my auto-ack to say 'thank you for writing me and if you didn't write to me then welcome to the club'. PAT] read more and respond »Posted 5 years ago by news01 in General Telecommunications Forum
