Re: OPERATIONAL Question - Spamblock protocol

[Karl Denninger <karl () Mcs Net>]

On Wed, Nov 19, 1997 at 12:48:27PM -0600, Jeremy Porter wrote:
> > The intent here is to do the following:
> >
> > 1)   Alert the real sender if we can reasonably reach the person.
> > 2)   Alert the relay owner if they were relayed through without knowing
> >     about it (and pressure them to fix it - pronto!)
> > 3)   If we can't do either right away, toss the bounce on the floor
> >     on the premise that its better to give up than keep screwing around
> >     and clog up the pipeline.
> >
> > What do the rest of you here think?  Option (1) doesn't look very sound; the
> > fight right now is between (2) and (3).
>
> In my opinion, if you fix the relay problem to about 75%, the rest of the
> relays will get fixed or die, due to the spam volume, then one you solve
> the relaying problem, someone has to transmit all the messages themselves,
> which greatly lengths the time to detect them, and makes the cost of spamming
> go up.  (It also allows IP based blocking to work better.)

Hmmm.. this seems to argue for the last approach - try to send the bounce to 
the FROM line at the relay, and failing that, send the bounce instead to 
{abuse|postmaster}@relay.site.

The only reason I don't want to bypass the user ENTIRELY is that if the
spamfilter gets someone who is legitimate (due to their being in the wrong
place, etc) I want there to be a reasonable chance that they'll get notified
by us that their mail was blocked and they need to talk to someone about it
(they may be legitimately trying to reach a customer of ours).

--
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