[Techtalk] bogus bounces--WTF?

[Maria McKinley]

>>
>> Carla Schroder wrote:
>>> What's with all the skillions of bogus email delivery failures I'm seeing 
>>> lately? All from .ru domains. Are they spams, and this is supposed to make me 
>>> curious and read them, and then lose my mind and buy stuff? Most of them are 
>>> unreadable anyway, they're either in bad HTML that doesn't render, or 
>>> Cyrillic characters.
>>>
>>> Carla

Forgot to mention that a list of reasons you might get these sorts of 
mails is listed here:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/VBounceRuleset

Backscatter is mail you didn't ask to receive, generated by legitimate, 
non-spam-sending systems in response to spam. Here are some examples, 
[WWW] courtesy of Al Iverson:

     * Misdirected "undeliverable email" bounce messages from spam runs, 
from mail servers who "accept then bounce" instead of rejecting mail 
during the SMTP transaction.
     * Misdirected virus/worm "OMG your mail was infected!" email 
notifications from virus scanners.
     * Misdirected "please confirm your subscription" requests from 
mailing lists that allow email-based signup requests.
     * Out of office or vacation autoreplies and autoresponders.
     * Challenge requests from "Challenge/Response" anti-spam software. 
Maybe C/R software works great for you, but it generates significant 
backscatter to people you don't know.