ubuntu-users Digest, Vol 44, Issue 168

[Aart Koelewijn]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:39:01 -0400, Albert Charron wrote:

> Aart Koelewijn wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:12:03 -0400, Albert Charron wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Chris.Masih at crawco.co.uk wrote:
>>>     
>>>> hey guys
>>>> please do me a favour and hash out any swear words cos otherwise
>>>> emails can be blocked at
>>>> my work address, im sure im not the only one who would have this
>>>> problem cheers
>>>>       
>>> I have the exact same problem with my mail host. They run spam
>>> filtering at the SMTP level and I often get kicked of the mailing list
>>> because of bounced e-mails. This is really annoying, but I have to
>>> admit it is less annoying than have hundreds of spam e-mails per day
>>> hitting my mailbox...
>>>     
>>>     
>> They should never bounce what they think is spam. The return address of
>> real spam is almost always fake. My internet connection was once was
>> completely useless because it was flooded with bounced spam to a faked
>> address in my domain (which I off course rejected because the address
>> did not exist, and then often got back bounced again)
>>
>> Aart
>>
>>
>>
> Well. They don't EXACTLY bounce the messages. They refuse the connection
> on the SMTP server before the message is accepted, then the sender's
> server is sending back the NDR. The difference is that with the bounce,
> the server would have accepted the message and then sent back the NDR
> itself.
> 
> By RFC, you have to send a NDR on rejected messages you accepted with a
> reason for the rejection... If you reject the message at the connection
> (based on server's IP for example), you still have to give a reason for
> the rejection, but no NDR is sent directly...
> 
> Sorry if I'm confusing, English isn't my main language...

It isn't mine either.

It should be impossible to reject a message based on something written in 
the message like swear words. To know what is written in a message you 
will have to read it and to be able to read it you will have to accept 
it. Once it is accepted you can't reject it anymore; you can send it to a 
special spambox (which is what my ISP does), send it to /dev/null or 
bounce it, which you should not do because of reasons stated above. My 
ISP also had the possibility to make a white-list. Emails from senders on 
that white-list are not checked for spam. This is a feature often used 
for mailing-lists as some of them tend to get a high spamscore.

Anyway, I prefer to read this mailinglist and write to it through the 
newsgroup gmane.linux.ubuntu.user. No problems with spamfilters that way.

Aart