Re: Do you send out Bounce Notifications?

[Paul Russell <prussell () ND EDU>]

On 3/13/2008 2:16 PM, Clyde Hoadley wrote:
> How are others handling the Bounce Notifications paradox?
> Do you send them out, or file them in a 'bounced/postmaster'
> InBox, or just log them, or just turn them off?

To the extent that it is possible, you should reject messages during the
SMTP session established by the external system that is attempting to
deliver the messages to your service, rather than accept messages and
generate non-delivery notices or virus warnings during post-acceptance
processing.

An MX server should validate the recipient address during the inbound SMTP
session and reject the message during the SMTP session, if the recipient
address is invalid, rather than accept the message, then generate a bounce
message when it cannot deliver the message to a non-existent mailbox.

At various points in time, vendors of various anti-virus and anti-spam
products have distributed products with the 'notify the sender' option
enabled. This can result in a large number of post-acceptance bounce
messages, aka 'backscatter' or 'outscatter', usually to forged or
non-existent addresses. You should check the configuration on your A/V
and A/S products, and verify that they are not generating backscatter.

It may be impossible to completely eliminate backscatter, but it should
be possible to reduce it to a trickle.

You may want to consider posing this question on the HiEd-EmailAdmin list
<http://listserv.nd.edu/archives/hied-emailadmin.html>. The archives are
viewable by anyone, but you must subscribe to the list in order to post to
the list.

--
Paul Russell, Senior Systems Administrator
OIT Messaging Services Team
University of Notre Dame
prussell () nd edu