[Techtalk] bogus bounces--WTF?

[Miriam English]

Maria McKinley wrote:

> Regarding Miriam's mail, the major problem with what you are suggesting 
> is that it assumes that all legitimate mail servers are configured 
> correctly, which is unfortunately far from true. It is actually possible 
> to configure spamassassin to do a reverse DNS to check the HELO 
> identifiers, but you have to be careful with this configuration, because 
> like I said, you can easily hit legitimate mails.

Hi Maria,

Thanks for the reply. I'm not really assuming anything about current 
mail servers. My suggestion would involve an alteration to the mail 
server so that it kept checksums of all sent email till either a 
confirmation was requested or some timeout (perhaps a couple of months) 
elapsed.

The new spam-immune email servers could happily replace current 
spam-prone email servers with zero effect on ordinary email recipients, 
but it need not replace the current system; it could operate alongside 
it. I expect a lot of people would simply switch over to the spam-free 
version pretty quickly and current systems would fall into disuse pretty 
quickly. Who wants spam? People running big servers would be very happy 
to change as the bandwidth required would drop pretty dramatically (I 
generally get far more spam than genuine email in one of my old 
unfiltered email accounts, and if attachments used a sensible binary 
transfer bandwidth for those would drop too).

If the new spam-immune email servers were configured incorrectly (for 
example using wrong headers) then email simply would not work. There is 
nothing particularly inconvenient about this. Any admin needs to pay 
attention to setting up a system correctly so that it works. If the 
current system sends email with bad headers then when people find they 
can't get through to people as more and more people move to spam-immune 
systems then I don't see that as a problem. We are already seeing a 
gradual loss of email anyway, as people lose genuine email in the deluge 
of spam, or they are accidentally filtered out because of keywords, or 
they get incorrectly blocked when their address is misidentified as a 
spammer, or their domain gets blacklisted because of some spammers using 
the ISP.

Remember that spam is far more than just an inconvenience and waster of 
net traffic. It is a major method of account theft, virus and trojan 
distribution, and running scams.

This tiny little, simple change would fix almost all that.

Best wishes,

	- Miriam

-- 
My time wasn't completely wasted last year.
I went on a 940 million kilometer journey.
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Website: http://miriam-english.org
Blog: http://miriam_e.livejournal.com