Re: Rejecting mail at SMTP level

Good mailing list software will auto-unsubscribe people only after
several consecutive failures (e.g. SmartList).  This behaviour
tolerates transient errors/malconfigurations/blacklistings/whatever.
Plus if you're relying solely on Razor you're just asking for trouble
(as many people have said many times).

Mark.


On 2003-02-24 (Monday) at 13:04:12 -0500, Fox wrote:
> I used to reject mail at the SMTP level until my users were mysteriously
> getting de-subscribed from mailing lists.  Good list admins will dump
> subscribers they can't deliver to, so if someone Razor's your list, then you
> get unsubscribed.  So now I don't do that any more.  It just silently passes
> on to the "spam" bucket.  I review messages that that aren't tagged by at
> least two spam filters.  And I don't have people calling me about their list
> subscriptions.
> 
> Fox
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Sheppard" <mark@xxxxxxx>
> To: "Bob Apthorpe" <apthorpe@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: <razor-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2003 3:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [Razor-users] Turning Razor into a censorship tool
> 
> > [...] I do: Sendmail -> MIMEDefang -> SpamAssassin -> Razor.  It's
> > very useful for preventing build up of double-bounced spam in the
> > postmaster mailbox which was totally swamping legitimate mail.  Of
> > course I've set things up so that SA has to return a pretty high
> > score for MIMEDefang to reject mail (10) and Razor alone won't do
> > it (although I've set that quite high (7)).  SA scores of 5 to 9.9
> > get a header added.  I also shoved a ClamAV scan in there.  This
> > setup has greatly cleaned up the email stream.
> >
> > Rejecting at the SMTP level really makes things much easier to
> > deal with from an admin point of view, and I imagine that many
> > others have discovered this and are doing likewise.  I never
> > silently discard email because then no-one knows it's a problem.
> > By rejecting hopefully someone somewhere will see that there's a
> > problem and do something about it.


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