am I just naive about spam

I think there's a little confusion here.

What Victor is talking about is configuring procmail to reply
to the address listed in the "From: " header or the "Reply-To: "
header. He is correct in saying that doing such a thing is
ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS, because 99.999% of the time these two
headers are bogus.

What Jean is talking about is configuring procmail to send
a "no such user" status to his local MTA (sendmail). A list
of exit codes can be found here:

http://www.procmail.org/jari/pm-tips-body.html#list_of_exit_codes

By having procmail return exit code 67 to his local MTA, that
fact will be sent back to the remote MTA that's currently
talking to Jean's MTA (the remote MTA is more than likely
a spam relay, and NOT the spammer's real MTA). The end result
is that the spam won't get to Jean's local disk.


D

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Jean Francois wrote:

> Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 12:33:28 -0700
> From: Jean Francois <jfranc@amex-trs.com>
> Reply-To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: Re: am I just naive about spam
>
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 11:39:09AM -0700, Victor Odhner wrote:
> Orig_Msg> Nope. Spammers forge their headers to avoid getting any replies at
> Orig_Msg> all, since if they gave a valid "From" address they would get bombed
> Orig_Msg> by angry recipients. They don't care how many rejections bounce
> Orig_Msg> back to their hijacked originating sites, or to their forwarding
> Orig_Msg> sites in Korea or Spain.
> Orig_Msg>
>
> As long as lazy admins refuse to close open relays it
> is proper to bounce all SPAM back to them and have them deal with their
> problem.
>
> The biggest problem I have is dealing with admins in foreign countries.
> I do not speak Greek, Urdu, Japanese, etc. and those countries are
> running woefully outdated mail servers in production environs.
>
> Not accepting the email at all saves my disk space and saves me the
> time of having to decipher forged headers to complain.
>

> See: http://www.mail-abuse.net/
>      news://news.admin.net-abuse.email
>      news://news.admin.net-abuse.sightings  <--for updating filters
>      http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/  <-- SPAM-L mailing list FAQ

>

> -- 
> The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
> hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series
> of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
>         -- H.L. Mencken

>
>