[Gllug] Spam

[t.clarke]

Re;   eating up bandwidth all the way .........

Sorry,  have to get my penny-worth in here, somewhat belatedly I am afraid


In my (admittedly not huge compared with others on the list) expereince,
most email these days seems to travel directly from the senders mail-server
to the receivers mail server  (in the case of spam directly from the spammers
machine).  Thus bandwidth consumed on a rejected spam is only that required
to conduct the initial HELO, MAIL FROM and RCPT TO phases.   On our systems
we reject an awful lot of spam at this point (before the DATA phase) by the
simple process of grey/black/white listing.  The SMTP response returned is a
'temporary' error, which will result in genuine mail servers retrying.
Spammers generally, however, do not retry and accordingly the spam is not
received, nor any valuable bandwidth consumed.

There are, regrettably, no perfect solutions to the spam problem   - any spam
'filtering' system will produce either unwanted rejections or allow unwanted
mail in,  to a limited degree.  Choose your method according to your priorities.

Maybe one day a system of being able to universally check the sender is genuine
will be in place.   At the present, it would seem we are a long way off from
that!

Tim
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