Geekblok

Today I received one of those emails again:

Subject: **Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**<br /> Body: Your message to: &lt;h.bokking@some-domain.dom&gt;<br /> was blocked by our Spam Firewall.<br /> The email you sent with the following subject has NOT BEEN DELIVERED:<br /> Subject: October 70% OFF

Well… thanks but no thanks, postmaster at edutel.nl!

I can very well understand the message was denied by their “Barracuda Spam Firewall” : the message originated from Russia and the V-pills-word was included in the “From”-header, two reasons enough to mark a message as spam. But I was never the actual sender of that message, since the “From” was forged…

This is a common technique used by spammers, but to overcome this one should never ever BOUNCE spam!! There’s even a whole page dedicated to “Why you shouldn’t bounce spam and viruses“, explaining why it’s better to REJECT these kind of emails. A must-read for every so called postmaster!

I myself don’t reject, but DISCARD all spam-messages identified by SpamAssassin / amavisd-new into a separate folder for further analysis, so it gives me the opportunity to make some tweaks to the spam-filter itself.