[conspire] anti spam

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):

> It's friendlier to non-spam senders, too, and makes
> it easier to recover from false positives.

Yes.  This is actually one of the reasons I became particularly
enamoured with J.P. Boggis's drop-in tarball of rules and configuration
files for the Exim4 MTA, 'EximConfig':  Boggis includes not only a set
of pretty carefully designed rules as a starting point[1] (all of which
stress _rejecting_ spam and other objectionable mail rather than
accepting and discarding or quarantining it), but also furnishes some
very specific and informative canned error messages to be issued in
any rejections.

The resulting MTA config, _if_ it rejects a particular piece of mail,
says in the 55x bounce notice very specifically _why_ my SMTP host 
is unwilling to accept the mail.

It's common for a non-spammer whose mail is rejected to be soreheads 
about it, and bitch as if the receiving sysadmin were a goofing-off 
servant, but at least _specific_ reject messages make the issue clear
and can be furnished rather than (as you say) mail simply disappearing
for mysterious reasons.


[1] Over the couple of years I ran such a config, I found a few 
of, for example, the Subject header rules that I considered silly and
undesirable, but they were easy to remove or disable, once noticed, 
and it was much easier to start with a config that was overly paranoid
and relax it a bit than to tighten up one that was too trusting.