[Mimedefang] Re: Great open letter about anti-virus, emails, bounces, etc.

[Jeremy Mates]

* Brent J. Nordquist <b-nordquist at bethel.edu>
> That letter was well-worded, but the virus alerts are only half the
> story here. The bounce messages are more numerous; I'm hearing people
> start to say that the whole concept of "undeliverable" messages may go
> away if mail admins are forced to turn it off due to all the forgery
> going on. And we spend a certain amount of time pacifying nervous
> users reporting bounces from "something I never sent".

Outgoing forgery could be stopped (or greatly limited) with "RMX"
records; there are a number of draft proposals for domains to list the
only hosts allowed to send outgoing mail. However, these are going to
take some time to become standards, get rolled out, get rolled out
without bugs, and become fully supported.

RMX:  http://www.danisch.de/software/rmx/

SMTP+SPF:  http://spf.pobox.com/intro.html

With such a solution in place, a random malwared host begins spewing
viruses, and the targetted mail servers lookup the domain and say "whoa,
you're not an allowed outgoing host for that domain -- reject."