In article , Andy Hall
writes
On 29 Jan 2005 01:57:00 -0800, "Mathew J. Newton"
wrote:

Andy Hall wrote:
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 08:34:33 +0000, "."

wrote:

In article , Peter Ramm
writes
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 00:58:51 GMT, raden wrote:


For anyone interested, I shall be using this email address from
now on.

I'm sure spammers' address harvesters will be ;-)

Having been looking at this for a while... it seems that most
harvesters
only pick up the domain address so in my case lots of stuff arrives
@chapelhouse, I set a simple filter that bounces anything without an
addressee, this reduces the spam to the odd few which are not a
problem.
Demon are filtering spam now anyway which has cut it down even
further


It's better to silently drop messages to users in your domain who are
not addressees rather than bouncing them. If you bounce them, the
spammer knows that he has a live domain and will then just try common
names at that domain.

Surely though the lack of *any* failure also indicates that the spammer
has got a 'live' domain?

If you silently blackhole the messages, the spammer will assume they
got to the intended recipient and probably do nothing more. If the
mail is rejected as undeliverable with SMTP, it attracts attention.

I've tried three different methods:

- Bounce the message back after accepting it on the SMTP server.

- Reject it as undeliverable to the specific user by the SMTP server.

- Silently black hole.

THe first two seem to both cause additional messages to users like
"postmaster" and common first names to be sent.

Being silent seems to stop this.

But AIUI most spamming is not done from an original address but from a
hijacked address (I have been the victim of this myself) so if this is
the case it doesn't matter whether you bounce or blackhole, the original
spammer never sees it anyway. You can argue that you waste bandwidth and
inconvenience any address that has been hijacked but as for getting a
response from the original source I can't see it myself.
--
David