On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 12:48:30PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Ian Jackson (ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk) wrote:
> > Stephen Frost writes ("Re: master's mail backlog and upgrade time"):
> > > Then bounce it locally. Duh. No reason to force master to deal with
> > > the bounce messages you feel are 'right' to send.
> >
> > I don't bounce it. I reject it at SMTP time with a 4xx or 5xx code.
>
> Congradulations! You've found the problem!
You would prefer that Ian:
a) inflict bounce spam scatter on the forged from addresses in the
malware and spam he doesn't want to accept delivery for; or
b) silently discards such mails resulting in the possibility of
legitimate mail being lost; or
c) just accepts the spam/malware?
I'm guessing (b), with the reasoning that if he chooses to reject
mail that his system thinks is bad then it's his problem to deal
with any false positives.
However in this day and age of the unwanted ratio of email being
greater than the wanted ratio, any system which accepts a lot of
unwanted email and then fails to deal with the refusal to accept by
systems further down the line is in real trouble. I do pretty much
the same as what Ian does, as I have explained, and so do many
others. It's the best way to deal with such mail: don't accept
what you're not prepared to deal with.
Instead of either side in this debate saying "Not my problem, you
should do this..." how about reaching some compromise? It sounds
like in the short term, Ian needs to discard some mail instead of
rejecting, and in the long term master needs to be able to cope with
this sort of thing. The absolute worst thing to do is to start
generating bounces to these forged addresses however.
My 2p,
Andy
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