Spammers Most Likely Users Of E-Mail Authentication (TechWeb)
Spammers Most Likely Users Of E-Mail Authentication (TechWeb)
Posted Jul 16, 2005 7:34 UTC (Sat) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)In reply to: Spammers Most Likely Users Of E-Mail Authentication (TechWeb) by giraffedata
Parent article: Spammers Most Likely Users Of E-Mail Authentication (TechWeb)
And plenty of your ham, too. Not many people hate spam enough to do that. In fact, you're most of the way toward the ultimate spam solution -- don't accept any mail at all.
Not really. You don't lose much ham by rejecting mail which has an invalid reverse-path, and in the cases that you do it tends to improve the actual communication.
Consider an analogy... if you are sending me a letter by snail mail and you accidentally put an invalid return address on it, how am I ever going to reply or actually manage to have a conversation with you? It's much better for that letter never to leave your local post office where your postie knows you and will hand it back to you.
That's basically what happens when my mail servers reject a mail from an invalid recipient. Most of the time it's actually spam, and the spambot just moves on to its next victim. But on the rare occasion that it's actually a genuine mail from someone who has misconfigured their mailer, the fact that I reject their mail means that their own mail server can tell them about it. If I'd accepted the mail, that chance for them to fix the problem would have been lost.