On Wednesday, May 30, 2001, at 02:41 PM, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
> Thus, email lint -- little bits of email transactions that produce
> tiny bits of server load forever.
Interesting point, but an admin not paying attention to bounces isn't
likely to notice lint in the mail queues, which is even more obscure. If
a site really wanted to do that, they should instead send copies of
every bounce to postmaster@sitename with a really annoying "fix your
damn mailing list" message. But fi they do, they should wait until stuff
has bounced for a couple of weeks, or they risk really annoying someone
for no reason,s ince auto-bounce systems need to be given time to do
their work.
> It's been a tactic employed by some people to in response to attempted
> relay operations: fail with a soft error rather than a hard error, so
> that the mail queues up on the sender side (although I'm sure that
> spam generators are smart enough to deal with this these days).
point is, the spam generators DON'T CARE -- because the queues fill up
in the open relays, not anywhere the spam operators see. And if you're
still running an open relay, you either don't care, either, or you're
not watching... And all those 4xx's cause extra processing on both sides
of the link, not just the open relay queue machine...
> I can
> imagine some enterprising young mail server operator taking this
> approach on an individual basis for select defunct mailboxes for which
> incoming activity is still seen.
and that makes as much sense, IMHO, as rejecting mail because the word
"homepage" is on it, just in case it happens to have the homepage virus
is in it. But I know a number of sites doing that, too. Simple
approaches that solve the wrong problem...
well, I guess that's why some of us make the semi-big bucks, right?
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
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Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
I'm really easy to get along with once you
people learn to worship me.
