Re: A new excuse for the sending of spam

"Robert Blair" wrote:

> I thought I had seen most of the excuses but this one tops them all.

Here's an excuse for backscatter excerpted from a non-delivery report
of an email I didn't send:

<quote>
The message carried your return address, so it was either a genuine mail
from you, or a sender address was faked and your e-mail address abused
by third party, in which case we apologize for undesired notification.

We do try to minimize backscatter for more prominent cases of UBE and
for infected mail, but for less obvious cases of UBE some balance
between losing genuine mail and sending undesired backscatter is sought,
and there can be some collateral damage on both sides.
</quote>

They (telesat.com.co) received the spam from 200.51.86.80 (Telefonica
Data Argentina) which has no rDNS but is not listed in any important
blocklists. Their SpamAssassin gave it 10.8 points out of the 10.0
required, so I suppose that's why they consider it 'less obvious' UBE.

For a large ISP (I don't know if this Colombian ISP is) it would be
impractical for a human to review every borderline case. Perhaps their
strategy is a reasonable compromise if they don't mind a little
collateral damage in the form of popping in and out of blocklists. At
least they didn't bounce the whole spam, which would have been quite
large going by the familiar headers I've seen in a lot of recent turds
forging my From address.

I didn't actually report this one because it was outside my self-
imposed time-window. I might not have reported it anyway, since I
rather appreciated the explanation from a South American ISP that is
obviously mindful of the issues.