[Dovecot] Using Dovecot-auth to return error code 450 (or other 4xx) to Postfix when user is on vacation

IVO GELOV (CRM) ivo at crm.walltopia.com
Tue Jan 17 10:52:40 EET 2012


On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:20:39 +0200, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:

> On 11:59 AM, IVO GELOV (CRM) wrote:
>>
>> The limitation of 1 message per week for any unique combination of
>> sender/recipient
>> does not stop backscatter - because each message can come with a new
>> forged FROM address,
>> and from different compromised mail servers.
>> The spammer does not have control over the body of the auto-replies
>> (which is something
>> like "I am not at the office, please write to my colleagues"), but it still
>> may cause the victims to take some measures.
>
>
> All true, but the sender in the sender/recipient combination is the
> forged From: that ultimately receives the backscatter and the recipient
> is your local user who set the vacation autoresponse. If you only have
> one or two local users on vacation at a time, any given backscatter
> recipient could receive at most one or two backscatter messages per week
> regardless of how many compromised servers the spammer sends from. And
> this assumes the spam is initially sent to multiple local users on
> vacation and gets past your local spam filtering.
>
> I don't know about you, but I have more significant potential
> backscatter sources to worry about.
>

I see your point and I agree with you this is a minor problem.
Thanks for your time, Mark.

Best wishes,
Ivo Gelov



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