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The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. Ie. The first step verifies the from/to addresses, then the messa
by josho 5y ago
The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail.
Ie. The first step verifies the from/to addresses, then the message body is sent. So, if the message body is clearly spam and you reject the message body all you've done is confirmed to the spammer that they are sending to a legit email address and they need to change their message so it no longer is rejected as spam.
As bad as the current system is it leaves spammers with uncertainty over whether their message made it through the spam filter.
- jasonjayr 5y agoWhat's stopping spammers from just having a GMail account they can use to test if the message made it through? I mean; I have to assume the engineers in charge of this @ Google are making the right call, but the cynic in me can't help but worry they are making the call in a way that benefits them at the cost of a healthier SMTP ecosystem. (ie, "Lets make email just unreliable enough that folks switch to Google Email 100%, or use some other Google Product for messaging ...") You can reject the message anytime after TO/FROM/DATA w/o signaling which of those 3 caused it the message to be rejected.
- teddyh 5y ago> The problem is by the time the message is deemed to be spam it's too late to reject the mail. That is incorrect. After the last DATA command from the spammer, your mail server can look at the mail and, if it’s spam, just say 558 5.7.1 That mail is ugly and you are ugly This rejects the mail and makes it bounce to the sender.