[plug] Bounce Spam (Back scatter)

[Adrian Woodley]

Was that directed at me? :P

On Sat, 16 Dec 2006 11:33:47 +0800, Adrian Chadd <adrian at creative.net.au> wrote:
> A random datapoint about this - UWA suffered from this problem for a few
> years
> as they have a spam/virus scanning mail server sitting in front of the
> whole
> campus. Said mail server didn't know about the users on each of the
> backend
> servers in departments and so would accept the mail and then end up
> passing on
> the generated bounces from invalid email addresses.
> 
> And, as you can imagine, the university has a large amount of churning
> email
> addresses and dictionary attempted spam, so a lot of mail was to bad
> addresses
> and bounces from said delivery attempt.
> 
> When Grahame turned on the postfix magic to query back-end servers about
> the
> existance of users (and cache the delivery attempt, positive or negative)
> they
> saw an immediate reduction in server load and incoming/outgoing traffic.
> 
> So its definitely worth looking into..
> 
> 
> 
> Adrian
> 
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