[Mimedefang] Notifying virus recipients

[Marc SCHAEFER]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 04:07:15PM +0900, alan premselaar wrote:
> not to mention that if your mail server is trying to send email

I modified my anti-spam system to send those notifications, containing
an URL allowing the sender to unlock his message if it was mistakenly
intercepted. That would have been appreciated.

However, I had to see that:

   - most of the end-users don't read mail they don't expect. They
     won't take the time to read a lengthy explanation about anti-spam.

   - you will send e-mail to un-existant addresses, as you said.

   - worse: you will send e-mail to existant addresses, but who haven't
     really send the spam. You will definitely get complaints from them.

   - worse yet: if by misfit you happen to send a notification to a
     spam-trap address (ie a spammer collected e-mail addresses from WWW
     space, then used some to send spam out so to defeat filtering, such
     as mailing-list filtering), you will be (your server!) listed in
     ORDB, RBL or similar databases. This happened to me.