[Mimedefang] Spammers who won't take no for an answer

[Joseph Brennan]

--On Tuesday, October 21, 2003 09:02 -0400 "David F. Skoll" 
<dfs at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Joseph Brennan wrote:
>
> [David Skoll]
>> > Is anyone seeing a new trend (maybe a new ratware package?)  I'm seeing
>> > spammers repeatedly retry the same message, even after a 5xx failure
>> > code.
>
>> Outlook does that.  It can go on for more than a day.
>
> Really??  But surely spammers don't use Outlook to connect directly
> to the victim's MX host.  I doubt Outlook even knows about MX records.


I know little of Outlook or Windows, but I was told by someone who
does that Outlook can be used as the mail-sending engine for other
applications, such as an app that reads addresses from a database
and sends mass mailings.  Here's the first one Google found me:
  http://www.worldssp.net/detailview.asp?proid=1499
This product is for my "email marketing needs".

I don't know about MX though.  The ones I'm seeing are our own
users hitting our smtp server over and over as if 5xx meant try
again in five minutes.

Joseph Brennan         Columbia University in the City of New York
Academic Technologies Group                   brennan at columbia.edu