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This is the comment you were replying to, attached to the weblog Nolisting - another anti-spam method?

#3 Re: Nolisting - another anti-spam method? Posted by lee (83.216.xx.xx) on Tue 30 Jan 2007 at 23:28 Any technique that relies on predicting the behaviour of 'non-spammer' SMTP software by reading the RFCs is broken. While the big, free, Unix daemons are predicable in their out-of-the box behaviour - there is a lot that can be configured. And much commercial mail software (from the point of a non-user, I admit) has been extremely lax in RFC compliance. A client has a mailing list in the thousands and only sends out a mail once a month. In those weeks, plenty can change in the status of the addresses mail is being sent to. However, with the different anti-spam techniques out there - it seems almost impossible to identify *actual* delivery issues, since there's a significant number of servers just pretending to have technical problems. Therefore new methods need to be developed, outside of the assumptions of the RFCs, to control delivery. Some backup MX servers don't issue DSNs for failed deliveries. The assumption is that, if there's been no issues with the primary, you might only expect spammers to be delivering to a backup MX first. Thus DSNs are not generated in the event of rejection from the primary since the return address is likely to have been forged (blowback). In this situation, if we consider that mail delivered to backup MXes is not likely to result in a DSN, persistant failure to connect to a primary MX (in the absence of other feedback) *might* be considered evidence of a dead address.

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