Re: Too much backscatter spam in gnome.org aliases

[Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 11:18:28PM -0400, Germán Poó-Caamaño wrote:
> Since 3 or 4 weeks ago I've been receiving a lot of bounces from
> emails I've never sent (backscatter).
> 
> Today I received more than 500 of those emails, 1/3 or so coming
> from .ru.  I've created some local filters, not enough yet.  And still
> it means a lot of traffic.
> 
> I'm not sure if I'm the only one; but you can check the logs.

Our weekly maillogs are between 3 and 4 GB.. there is no analysis
possible.

If you have a solution to the backscatter, please share. The only
address that I noticed having problems is the support gnome org alias,
not any other address (aside from mailing lists).

The emails are generated by broken other mailing systems. Apart from
breaking RFCs (rejecting bounces, thus breaking bounce detection by
mailman), I don't see how to prevent this. Especially as anyone is free
to use their own mailserver to send out mail using their @gnome.org
alias.

-- 
Regards,
Olav