Filters That Fight Back

[Matthias Andree]

Matt Garretson <mattg at assembly.state.ny.us> writes:

> In addition to the forged-address/innocent-bystander issue, I think
> that generating bounces for spam is likely to "fight back" against
> you more than it would against any spammers.  My guess is that, more
> often than not, your bounce message will simply bounce right back
> to you,

While "fighting back" may hurt yourself more than the spammer, it will
not happen through bounced bounces, as the bounce will be sent with a
NULL return path and cannot be returned. If you're seeing
double-bounces, that's something created locally and doesn't cause
bandwidth traffic unless you forward your postmaster address to an
external site.

I was under the impression that "fighting back" would mean attacking
those URLs form a spammer's mail that are advertised. I. e. if you're
getting these "look at my new website + URL" spams, that would mean
matching the URLs (or hosts, FWIW) and downloading those sites that are
known spammer's sites, to cause the spammer traffic volume.

However, if the site is on a virtual server (several servers on one IP),
it's going to hurt innocent bystanders again.

> decide where to send a bounce.  Of course, this would likely require
> integrating bogofilter with your MTA in an atypical manner (e.g. a
> sendmail milter).

Indeed - or a proxy.

-- 
Matthias Andree

Encrypt your mail: my GnuPG key ID is 0x052E7D95