[Mimedefang] Re: compare mimedefang to mailscanner

[Scott Silva]

Tim Boyer spake the following on 1/16/2007 5:04 PM:

> 
> This brings up the mail reason I'm not using MailScanner.  Mail rejected
> during the SMTP conversation goes back to the sending server.  Mail bounced
> afterwards goes wherever the spammer wants it to go.  Google 'backscatter
> spam'.
> 
That is why you never bounce. Reject, good -- bounce, bad!
Mailscanner doesn't bounce spam by default. It hasn't for close to two years.
But the option is still there, and is discouraged in the docs, in the comments
of the config file, and is very discouraged on the lists.
It comes down to two things. If you are required by law to archive "all"
communications to or from your company, or like some countries cannot reject
e-mail without a human being reviewing it, use mailscanner. If you can reject
anything you please, and your users won't ask you for it later, use
mimedefang. The only bounce messages I generate are for unknown users, or spam
control measures in sendmail like greetpause and connection limiting. I may
accept the spam, and keep it for a week, and archive some of it for future
bayes training corpus, but I have vispan running to drop the spammers into the
access file with a 550 to stop the rest of the crap from that address.

Besides, maybe I will need some via--gra in the future! ;-)