Spam Filter

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 15:28 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> > 
> > Doing this means that *you* get to see the mail identified as spam, when 
> > you look in the special file. Rejecting the message in the SMTP 
> > transaction means that the *sender* knows you didn't get the email, so 
> > they can either try resending a less-spammy message, or contacting you 
> > by other means if it's something important. No intervention needed on 
> > your part.
> > 

> I get you point but we must get different kinds of spam. I get spam from
> addresses that cannot or will not accept return mail. So it seems to me
> I would be pelted by lots of returned mail I would have to deal with.

If you reject in a milter during the SMTP conversation, you officially
never accepted the message and you don't have to send a bounce.  This
is up to the machine that was attempting to send to you to handle
since it was unable to deliver to your server.  A lot of spam is sent
by special purpose programs that won't retry or process errors so your
rejection just dumps it on the floor.  If you reject legitimate mail
coming through a normal relay, the sender will get a bounce message,
and sometimes that relay will even be able to get a return back to
misconfigured local clients that you couldn't reach from your server.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com