Re: Spam, bounces and gcc list removal

["Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@linux-mips.org>]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020, Florian Weimer wrote:

> >  Spam bouncing is evil and often hits an innocent person whose address has 
> > been faked by the sender of spam, making the source of bounces not better 
> > than the originator.
> 
> I expect this to be an SMTP-level rejection, not a bounce.  sourceware
> generates a bounce from that, and Mailman reacts to that.  But the
> target mail server does not generate a bounce.  So your concern about
> bad ISP behavior does not apply here.

 You mean as with a failure response given to the SMTP DATA command?  
This is actually equally evil as the resulting bounce (i.e. a delivery 
failure notification, or a flood of them, once other MTAs have joined in a 
response to a mass mailing; that is exactly what I suffered from a few 
years ago) will hit whoever's fake envelope sender address has been given 
with the MAIL FROM command.  You don't expect a real one with spam, do 
you?

 As I say, just silently drop it on the floor, this is the least harmful 
way of dealing with spam.  And sometimes indirectly blocking a specific 
e-mail address chosen to look like a source of spam *will be* the actual 
objective of what looks like usual spam.

  Maciej