[ On Sunday, February 29, 2004 at 16:29:41 (-0500), gabriel rosenkoetter wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: forged bounces causing unsubscribes?
>
> While it would be nice if this didn't cause unsubscriptions, you
> really shouldn't ever bounce spam.

Keep in mind that the issue is with _forged_ bounces.

> It doesn't do any good: the
> envelope sender isn't responsible for someone forging their email
> address, if it's even a valid email address.

It's not always that simple.  Consider what happens when anyone uses an
alias or ~/.forward file on some other system to forward their mail to
their primary or "home" system, and then somewhere along the line the
message is rejected at SMTP time, or worse an intermediate filter that's
not so well designed and implemented causes a new bounce message to be
generated.

> Just drop it on the
> floor instead.

That's not always the right thing to do, and certainly never with
anything that isn't guaranteed with 101% certainty to be spam or
malicious content, and even then it's _much_ better to reject it at SMTP
time than to accept and then drop it.

> More to the point, the unsubscription is a response, by the mailing
> list software, to being overwhelmed by bad addresses, out of
> office messages, and useless virus infection notices. There's no
> functional difference between that and bounces from spam. So don't
> send them.

Symptomatically there is no difference, but _functionally_ there's a
huge difference!  ;-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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