Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : :fail: vs :fail: no such address here

[mealto]

:fail: vs :fail: no such address here

What is the major difference. In particualr to the system resources that gets used and implications to deal with spammers. TIA!

[ffeingol]

As far as I know they both do exactly the same thing. The second one simply (also) returns the message "no such address here" back to the originating SMTP server.

Frank

[mealto]

So if there is a a physical bonce message, would that not cause more "usage" on the server.

With resources aside, most spammers are probably using some system to do their spamming and a bounce message would not bother them.

Which one do others use? with or without the message?

Come to think of it, would using :backhole: log all activity for future investigating?

[ffeingol]

:fail: is not a bounce. I'm not a SMTP expert, but :fail: causes the mail to be rejected before your server actually accepts it. You really don't want to use :blackhole". :blackhole" accepts the message, runs it through all your spam/av filtering, then dumps it. Why would anyone want to do all that processing?

Frank

[mealto]

So what is the difference bewteen:

:fail:
:fail: no such address here

[Harmolodic]

I believe ffeingol gave an exhaustive answer to your question:

Originally Posted by ffeingol

As far as I know they both do exactly the same thing. The second one simply (also) returns the message "no such address here" back to the originating SMTP server.

[mealto]

My bad, how did I miss that one? Sorry about that.

So that leads to my next question, which one should I use considering there is lots of spammers using our domain in the "reply to" field?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Harmolodic]

That's quite a different issue. You should add an SPF record to your domain's DNS zone in order to cut down on email spoofing: http://www.openspf.org/

[mealto]

H Harmolodic,

Thanks for the tip. Our VPS host did that for us already. Just wondering if there is anything that we can do to decrease spam. We see a list of emails in the queue and it was not sent out by us! Darn spammers.