[Mimedefang] Auto Responders and SPAM

David F. Skoll dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Thu Sep 7 18:55:19 EDT 2006


David Benigni wrote:

> I have been bitten twice by SPAM email forging addresses, someone
> vacation rule send a message to a rbl trap account and my servers get
> black listed.

> Other than disabling rules like this, has anyone some up with a way to
> reduce this?  I was think of using MIMEDefang to do this, but I wanted
> to get community feedback first.

Well, I suppose that if something scores high on SpamAssassin, you
could add a Precedence: bulk or Precedence: junk header, which makes
some auto-responders not respond.  (But this isn't guaranteed.)

Or you could add an Auto-Submitted: auto-replied header to the incoming
mail, which makes some auto-responders not respond.  (But this isn't
guaranteed.)

Do you see a pattern? ;-) There's no nice way to do this short of (1)
virtually guaranteeing that your auto-responder never gets fed a spam
message, or (2) disallowing auto-responders.

Regards,

David.

PS: If you *must* use an auto-responder, please make sure it behaves
at least as nicely as Sendmail's "vacation" program, which is one of the
better-written auto-responders.  I've banned a few people from this
list for using broken auto-responders.



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