4 ms·

> I wonder how large percentage of messages are dropped silently by services like GMail as a spam prevention measure. I bet it's non-zero. Nobody forces you to

by gst 15y ago

> I wonder how large percentage of messages are dropped silently by services like GMail as a spam prevention measure. I bet it's non-zero. Nobody forces you to use GMail. There are other mailservers with a much more sane behavior. For example, the mail server I use either accepts a mail, or doesn't accept it (when it looks like spam). It might be possible that a certain percentage of mails is misclassified, but in that cases the sender receives a confirmation.

zokier 15y ago
I can't choose what service my recipients use. edit: I might add that spam backscatter is a significant issue (which stems from fundamental problems in email), and thus not sending bounce messages is fairly sane too.
- gst 15y ago
  Yes - sending bounce messages isn't a good idea in most cases. But you don't need to: you can just reject messages during the SMTP dialog and then there's no need to send a bounce (that what's the mailserver I use does).
- vog 15y ago
  You are confusing "clean rejects on SMTP level" with "backscatter". If your server accepts the email first, then scans it, and then decides it is spam, it's too late. Then it has only the choice between ignoring and backscatter, because it can't reliably inform the real sender - the TCP/IP connection is already closed and the email's sender is almost certainly forged. However, if your server scans the email during the SMTP transfer, and rejects it with a clean error code, the sender gets a clean error message and its the sender who is responsible to inform the client. Note that there's another downside of this approach which is why you don't find this early-reject very often in the wild: The receipient has no chance to get the email, not even by scanning their spam folder. So the sender has to understand the error message and to send a "less spammy" email, or he can't get in contact to the receipient at all. For some professions, this might be a no-go, as this means missing potential customers just because they use a bad email client which sends spammy-looking emails. However, if you don't have this "type" of customers, early-rejecting on SMTP level is a perfect solution. We're using this configuration for years on our mail servers, it works pretty well and we've never, ever had to send backscatters. Yet every sender whose email was classified as spam has been correctly notified about this issue.

by gst 15y ago

zokier 15y ago

I can't choose what service my recipients use. edit: I might add that spam backscatter is a significant issue (which stems from fundamental problems in email), and thus not sending bounce messages is fairly sane too.

gst 15y ago
Yes - sending bounce messages isn't a good idea in most cases. But you don't need to: you can just reject messages during the SMTP dialog and then there's no need to send a bounce (that what's the mailserver I use does).
vog 15y ago
You are confusing "clean rejects on SMTP level" with "backscatter". If your server accepts the email first, then scans it, and then decides it is spam, it's too late. Then it has only the choice between ignoring and backscatter, because it can't reliably inform the real sender - the TCP/IP connection is already closed and the email's sender is almost certainly forged. However, if your server scans the email during the SMTP transfer, and rejects it with a clean error code, the sender gets a clean error message and its the sender who is responsible to inform the client. Note that there's another downside of this approach which is why you don't find this early-reject very often in the wild: The receipient has no chance to get the email, not even by scanning their spam folder. So the sender has to understand the error message and to send a "less spammy" email, or he can't get in contact to the receipient at all. For some professions, this might be a no-go, as this means missing potential customers just because they use a bad email client which sends spammy-looking emails. However, if you don't have this "type" of customers, early-rejecting on SMTP level is a perfect solution. We're using this configuration for years on our mail servers, it works pretty well and we've never, ever had to send backscatters. Yet every sender whose email was classified as spam has been correctly notified about this issue.