[Techtalk] bogus bounces--WTF?
Maria McKinley
maria at shadlen.org
Wed Oct 15 03:05:18 UTC 2008
>>
>> 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.
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