On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Andrew Daviel wrote: > On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Don Armstrong wrote: >> That's why you should generally just discard them instead of >> rejecting. If you're fairly certain that it's spam, rejecting just >> means that you increase the likelihood that people get backscatter >> from forwarding MTAs.[1] > > I would rather let someone know that their mail has been rejected, > than dedicate gigabytes of storage to spam on the offchance that > some is legit, or tell someone that their flight confirmation or > visa application might have gone to /dev/null.
Those are examples of automated messages, so no one will bother to resend those; a reject is equivalent to /dev/null'ing it. > I do get occasional queries from users about "I never sent that", > but the volume of such is infinitesimal compared to the volome of > spam, so I conclude it is not a significant problem. I get about a 100 backscatter messages a day. It certainly is much smaller than the amount of spam I deal with, but backscatter messages have to be dealt with specially[1], because you want to see some of them. >> 1: From zombie machines in the networks of ISPs, for example. > > How common is that? Fairly common, unfortunatly. Don Armstrong 1: It's even worse that a large number of DSNs don't follow standard paradigms, like matching procmail's FROM_DAEMON or similar. -- No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white. -- Sir Karl Popper _Logic of Scientific Discovery_ http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu _______________________________________________ Spamass-milt-list mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/spamass-milt-list
