On 4/9/2022 4:15 PM, John Levine wrote:
We call that VERP, putting a per-recipient bounce address on bulk mail
so you can tell which recipients are bouncing. It works great, not for
any nefarious purpose, but because (as you are surely aware) bounces
and rejection messages are stupendously inconsistent, so VERP is by
far the best way to figure out which address is bad so you can stop
sending it mail. This is normal list management.
I agree there are lousy mailers who do listwashing, but VERP doesn't
have much to do with it.
John,
I did NOT meant to imply that VERP is either inherently bad nor most
misused. Sorry if my message came across that way! For most most
legit/well-known ESPs and for most of the legit organizations who are
hosting their own email on their own mail servers - I think VERP is
mostly good and used properly. I just strongly suspect that the many of
the times that someone is looking for this feature in a shared/large
domain-mail-hosting system - for a "personal domain" - in that case,
this feature is probably more often than not going to be for nefarious
purposes, even if there are some good exceptions to that. Spammers (and
unethical ESP upstarts!) both LOVE and GREATLY NEED to "piggy back" on
the good reputations of large systems, and so they try to do that as
much as they can get away with it. If they can do that AND get this
feature - that's a service that these types would especially desire!
(But, in contrast, the type of person who would be an exception to this
might be someone who would be involved in the mailop mailing list... so
I'm guessing/assuming... that the originator of this thread... is innocent.)
--
Rob McEwen, invaluement
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