Re: [sa-list] Re: slightly OT: sudden rise in Rumplestiltskin attacks?

["Dan Mahoney, System Admin" <da...@prime.gushi.org>]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Jeff Chan wrote:

>> Pedantic nit-pick of the day:
>> I'm sure you meant reject instead of bounce, right?
>
> "Bounce" to some means reject.  "Bounce" to others means forward.

The distinction between forwarding and bouncing for me is the same as in 
pine -- bounce means to simply re-email the mail to the final destination, 
whereas forward means to encapsulate the original email as an attachment, 
or enclose the email inside a new email with a (fwd) subject line, and 
additional headers.

-Dan

>
> For me, it always meant reject.  As far as I can tell bounce
> meaning reject is a server term and bounce meaning forward
> is something from userland.
>
> Jeff C.
> --
> Jeff Chan
> mailto:jeffc@surbl.org
> http://www.surbl.org/
>

--

"Man, this is such a trip"

-Dan Mahoney, October 25, 1997

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
Site:  http://www.gushi.org
---------------------------

Re: [sa-list] Re: slightly OT: sudden rise in Rumplestiltskin attacks?

[sn...@fastmail.fm]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:05:44 -0400 (EDT), "Dan Mahoney, System Admin"
<da...@prime.gushi.org> said:
> On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Jeff Chan wrote:
> 
> >> Pedantic nit-pick of the day:
> >> I'm sure you meant reject instead of bounce, right?
> >
> > "Bounce" to some means reject.  "Bounce" to others means forward.
> 
> The distinction between forwarding and bouncing for me is the same as in 
> pine -- bounce means to simply re-email the mail to the final
> destination, 
> whereas forward means to encapsulate the original email as an attachment, 
> or enclose the email inside a new email with a (fwd) subject line, and 
> additional headers.
> 
> -Dan

Well, to some, "Bounce" means to hit a hard surface and then spring back
the other way. But I don't think there was any ambiguity in the original
discussion, because we were talking about MTA behavior. If you want to
talk about basketball or mail clients or Majordomo or forwarding, then
the term 'bounce' might have another meaning. In MTA context, a "bounce"
is well defined:
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Bounce_message

I'm picky about this one because it can make a big difference for
joe-job victims. If your server "bounces" messages addressed to invalid
users (which was suggested by the person I originally replied to), then
you're creating a problem by generating DSN messages which flood joe-job
victims. If your server's rejecting the messages, then the remote MTA
software might still create a DSN, but hopefully most ratware running
through a proxy doesn't bother to try notifying the bogus sender address
that the spam wasn't delivered.

It's easy to set up a mail system that bounces instead of rejects
messages with invalid addressees, especially if you have SpamAssassin
installed on a system which relays the mail to another server for final
delivery. Not an uncommon setup, especially on this list, and there are
people who aren't aware of the distinction. Apologies for the pedantry,
hopefully someone will find this educational and configure their gateway
MTA to reject mail addressed to invalid users, instead of trying to
relay to the final delivery server and then bouncing when it is refused.
--
  
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