[courier-users] Re: Ham black hole?

(I changed the subject because it's the false
positives we're concerned about, not the spammers)

Bill Taroli wrote:
> it also just seems wrong. I haven't reviewed the RFCs,
> but I wonder if it might also be considered non-compliant.

Your intuition is correct. It's a severe violation.

From RFC 2821:

| 6.1 Reliable Delivery and Replies by Email
|
| When the receiver-SMTP accepts a piece of mail (by sending a "250 OK"
| message in response to DATA), it is accepting responsibility for
| delivering or relaying the message. It must take this responsibility
| seriously. It MUST NOT lose the message for frivolous reasons, such
| as because the host later crashes or because of a predictable
| resource shortage.
|
| If there is a delivery failure after acceptance of a message, the
| receiver-SMTP MUST formulate and mail a notification message.

> I'm curious to hear what others are doing in this regard.

I found a very good explanation of this decision, on Usenet:

In article <slrnd6fb04.drv.nanae@bill.heins.net>, Perusion Hostmaster wrote:
| The choices for a network administrator are hard. You say I
| have to allow all mail "because of free speech". I say free
| speech is being degraded by spam because it makes it hard for
| legitimate speech to be heard. Admins basically have three
| approaches to take:
|
| 1. Little or weak filtering or blocking means communications are lost as
| people have scan-and-delete errors due to battle fatigue from their
| daily fight with spam in their mailbox. Much legitimate email is
| lost, and it is lost and *neither party knows it was never read*.
| This collateral damage is spread over every part of the net,
| spam-friendly or no.
|
| 2. Aggressive filtering and tagging means that legitimate communications
| are tagged as false-positives. People usually don't scan their spam
| folders carefully, because such a high percentage is spam. Again,
| legitimate email is lost and *neither party knows it was never read*.
| This collateral damage is spread over every part of the net,
| spam-friendly or no.
|
| 3. Aggressive blocklisting and rejecting causes some legitimate email to
| be lost. However, that collateral damage is limited to spam-friendly
| parts of the Internet. The sender knows full well it was not read and
| can re-send the message via another channel if it is important. This
| knowledge also allows them to take action to correct blocking errors;
| and heightens awareness of who is not doing their part to fight spam.
|
| To me, selecting #3 is a no-brainer. When legitimate email gets lost,
| the sender knows it was not received. And it is almost all lost from
| networks participating in the massive denial of service attack on the
| Internet at large that is spam.

Your employer's choice (just drop messages on the floor) is not even
included in Perusion Hostmaster's list; I guess we could call it #0.





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