[nzlug] OT: getting joe-jobbed by spammer

[Jim Cheetham]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Steve Holdoway <steve at greengecko.co.nz> wrote:
>  Also, the best thing to do with spam is to dump it to /dev/null, although it *is* contrary to the rfc. That way the spammers aren't able to erify their mailing lists...

Certainly dropping it into /dev/null while you're working out how to
reject it up front is worthwhile :-)

In the long term, however, with 90% of your incoming email probably
being spam, think of all that bandwidth being wasted while you receive
their data. Far better to drop the connection early (either with RFC
rejection or not, as you choose)

I'd be happy if spammers improved and verified their mailing lists to
only use legit addresses. The current scattershot approach means that
we have to waste time rejecting unknown recipients most of the time.
The real addresses will receive spam regardless of the quality of the
spammer address databases ... so we're going to have to rely on
content inspection rather than the mechanics of how the message
arrived anyway ... and if we're not needing to waste resources on
rejecting invalid addresses, we'll have more available for inspection
:-)

-jim