

Lamson's Bounce Detection Algorithm - twampss
http://lamsonproject.org/blog/2009-07-09.html

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mkyc
I don't check my spam folder. If it's in there, it's not delivered.

Email providers should (optionally) bounce spam, rather than sending it to a
spam folder. This would eliminate the problem of false-positives, since
senders would be notified. It would reduce traffic, since spammers would know
the message didn't get through to any inbox, and so would focus elsewhere.
Finally, it would eliminate the temptation of a spam folder for people who
don't want spam, but peek 'just to make sure', and thereafter go on to support
spammers.

Perhaps someone here is running an email provider, or working on such
software?

~~~
eli
Bounce it where? The return address is _always_ fake and sometimes it's that
of an innocent bystander.

~~~
nailer
I'd 550 the spamming server sending it to me, they can take care of the bounce
themselves.

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snprbob86
As I discussed in an earlier thread, our custom mailer uses Gmail on a custom
domain for storage; fetchmail connects via IMAP and then pipes to procmail
which pipes to a Python script.

Lamson looks like it can offer a lot of great features, but I'll have to run
my own SMTP server and I'm worried about downtime. If I let Gmail store the
messages, I don't need to worry (much) about messages going missing. If my
server crashes, fetchmail will just pick up the missed messages in the next
fetch, only a few minutes late.

For others who run mail servers: how do you handle downtime?

~~~
wmf
Besides what sho said about SMTP uptime not being that important, Lamson can
read messages from a Maildir queue. You could use Gmail -> fetchmail ->
Lamson.

[http://lamsonproject.org/docs/deferred_processing_to_queues....](http://lamsonproject.org/docs/deferred_processing_to_queues.html)

~~~
snprbob86
Aaahh cool. I didn't think about putting fetchmail in between. I was assuming
I'd have to do Gmail forwarding to Lamson. We'll probably migrate to Lamson
eventually to make good use of things like this neat bounce handling. Thanks!

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sielskr
From the page that says what the Lamson project is about (emphasis mine):

"I’m always looking for people doing interesting things with e-mail. _Even if
you’re a spammer_ , or someone trying to destroy the spammers, I want to hear
from you" (Zed Shaw, maintainer of the Lamson project).

~~~
sp332
He's made the point before that any advance in email technology will be
primarily used for spam.

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/03/lamson/print.html>

"I totally think Lamson will be used more for spam than for anything really
useful. My hope with Lamson is that it acts like a modern sewage system for
the internet. Everyone's gotta poop. You can't escape it, so why not try to do
it in a clean fashion that improves the general health of everyone involved?"

~~~
icey
He's also said that he hopes it will mean spammers end up better at targeting
so that there will be less shit flowing overall.

~~~
eli
Makes sense. The huge amount of backscatter ain't helping anyone

