[Mimedefang] What to do w/ SPAM?

[David F. Skoll]

On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Jeff Grossman wrote:

> But, you would be bouncing the message at the SMTP transaction level, so
> you never actually receive it.  The sending server will have to deal
> with the bounce, not you.

That's true, mostly.  The only exception is if the spammer sends spam
thus:

MAIL FROM:<nosuchperson at yourdomain.com>
RCPT TO:<victim at yourdomain.com>

Then, action_bounce() would cause the sending relay to bounce an error
to your server.  However, this is pretty rare, and action_bouncing spam
is a good way to handle it.

I use CanIt (of course!) which I have set up to:

- Bounce anything scoring over 20
- Tempfail anything scoring between 5-20 until I can approve it, at which
  point it either gets accepted or action_bounced().
- Tempfail unconditionally from a bunch of popular free e-mail
  services until I approve the mail.  This has blocked spam which would
  otherwise have snuck past SpamAssassin.  I do not think this endears me
  to the folks who run the free e-mail services...

I also use the HELO trick raised by Jim McCullars in posting
http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/mimedefang/2002-August/001949.html
I find it catches 4-5 spammers per week.

--
David.