General considerations for spam blocking/filtering

Whatever spam mitigation strategy you use, ideally it should be driven by user (or at least organizational) concerns, not just by your personal preferences. It's also important to remember that the user experience of spam varies widely -- some people get very little spam, some people get a lot. The more users you have the greater the variety of demands and potential for conflicting desires.

When blocking spam, being able to provide some indication of what you blocked and why you blocked it can help with troubleshooting when legitimate email is blocked. It's often possible to customize the message given during the SMTP session, which is often returned to a user in a bounce message.

As much as possible, try to either reject mail during SMTP or deliver something to the recipient; don't generate bounce messages to what are often forged sender addresses, and making stuff just disappear with no notification to either the sender or recipient makes troubleshooting far more difficult.

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Steve VanDevender
Last modified: Thu Jul 19 14:34:36 PDT 2007