Re: What To Do About Fake Addresses?

From: mouss (no email)
Date: Mon Oct 01 2007 - 11:44:55 EDT

  • Next message: Victor Duchovni: "Re: odd log entries"

    KashMaster wrote:
    > This question seems to have been answered many times and in various
    > ways... in fact, so often that there is such an overabundance that it
    > is difficult to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Consequently, I am
    > seeking your opinions both in general and specifically with regard to
    > postfix.
    >
    > To expand on the subject line: I was greeted (?) this morning by a
    > mailbox of several thousand "mail failure" notices from servers all over
    > the world. Without exception, these represented rejected spam (either
    > caught by a spamguard or sent to a bad address) that had various
    > non-existent return addresses at one of my domains.
    >
    > These were forwarded to a specific mailbox which I set up for unknown
    > recipients... seemed like a good idea at the time, but obviously there
    > are drawbacks.

    This is bad because you will discard mail to mistyped addresses (what if
      I send mail to kachmaster? if you discard it, I won't notice my typo
    and will assume you got my message).

    Instead, use address validation to reject mail to (and from) invalid
    addresses. if your maps are correctly configured, then you can add
            reject_unlisted_recipient
            reject_unlisted_sender
    somewhere at the top of your restrictions (so that such mail is rejected
    before you do expensive checks).

    for backscatter using valid addresses, see the BACKSCATTER README. or
    you can just live with this until you get annoyed enough to start block
    listing the broken servers.

    >
    > No doubt the general subject lines can be filtered (and in fact, as this
    > has happened before, a few thousand of them were filtered to "rejected"
    > mailbox), but the more important question to my mind is whether there is
    > something better (or additional) to do that would let the sender know
    > that the return address was faked and did not originate from this domain?

    there is nothing to tell the sender. They are broken, and some of them
    will bounce your posts to their postmaser/abuse/... addresses (so these
    are multi-broken), and you'll get bored very quickly. either ignore or
    block the outscatter client.


  • Next message: Victor Duchovni: "Re: odd log entries"





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