Re: Fwd: failure notice

Simon Shapiro  <[email protected]> wrote:

> I test about 700 messages a week.  The attached message is the first
> of its kind I see.  Is this an indication of a defficiency in the
> test software?  My setup?

I am a bit surprised that this message is the first of this kind that
you see. I get hundreds of these each day. The DSBL test suite attempts
a few dozen special email addresses that test for known security flaws
in mailers. Normally a well behaved mailer will reject these recipient
addresses right away and no bounce message is generated. (Or the MTA
accepts and delivers the message!).

Some broken mailers accept everything and generate a bounce message
later on. Qmail is the king of the broken mailers. (Yes, DSBL uses
qmail).

When I started testing I created a mail alias spamtrap-owner@ so that
administrators of tested systems could contact me if there was a
problem, typically a typo when I manually enter an IP nr for testing.
But after drowning in backscatter for a few days I quickly changed my
mind and I am now using devnull@ as the envelope sender, assuming that
complainers will find their way to my abuse@ or postmaster@ mailbox
anyway.

> [ I test that many because this is the amount of spam that bypasses
> my dnsrbl pre-filter.

Do you mean that you get 700 spams per week delivered to your personal
mailbox? That's an awful lot.

> The most hits seem to come from spamcop... ]

Spamcop is a nice blocklist which works really well for me. But I have a
liberal whitelist that covers a large percentage of my incoming mail. SC
is way too aggressive for large mail systems that cannot easily
whitelist most of their traffic. I therefore always attempt to verify a
SC hit and report the offender to DSBL.

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