Slashdot Mirror
Proper Ways to Dispose of Spam?
An anonymous reader asks: "My domain name is being stolen by spammers; they forge outgoing mail using my poor innocent domain name. First, I'd like to plead with mail server administrators out there: please REJECT spam and undeliverable mail. If you reject instead of bouncing then legitimate mail senders will still know there is a problem. Second, do you have any tips for dealing with a flood of spam bounces? Exim is pitching the bounces pretty quickly, but my server is still getting overwhelmed."
In the case of stolen sender addresses, SPF attempts to address this problem but has it been effective?
Ahhh, I had one of those -yesterday-. We have SPF implemented, and it still doesn't work very well, alas.
I got a call from a sysadmin somewhere in nowheresville USA. The minute I picked up the phone, the guy started berating me, since I was destroying his domain, and it was all my fault, because I'm running Exchange and obviously I was infecting him with Winblows.
After I finally got things sorted out, I walked him through exactly how and why it wasn't our domain a'tall, which would have been obvious had he looked at the headers of any one of the thousands of emails he claimed he recieved. If he knows how to read any of them. When he realized he was wrong, he slammed the phone down midsentence.
Point of the story: SPF is great, proper mail server administration is great, but there will always be jerks who think they know what they're doing when they don't, and they're the bane of the whole system, more like a wolf in sheep's clothing than a known enemy.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
You have already failed the first rule of disposing of Spam:
1. For goodness sake, whatever you do, don't eat the stuff!
KFG