[Techtalk] Allow all relays through sendmail

[Mary Gardiner]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 09:59:29AM +1100, jenn at simegen.com wrote:
> What I do know is that I -wouldn't-. set it up for anyone to relay
> through. That's called an 'open relay' and it WOULD be found by 
> spammers and you WOULD wind up with spammers using you as a redirection.
> With all the attendant headaches that causes - and your machine put
> on the open relay blocklists.

The main headaches outside of the block lists:
 * The possibility of huge fees because someone uses you to send gigs of
   traffic.
 * Your mail queues becoming enormously full and dominating your
   connection and possibly using up all the RAM on your machine due to
   the thousands of spams in the queue.
 * People who receive the spam and read the headers will mail you all
   the time to complain.

Spammers are really good at finding open relays these days.

-Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>