abuse@ and postmaster@ in the modern world?

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 01:01:54AM +0000, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> So I don't think I've ever got useful mail through postmaster@ and
> only occasionally has abuse@ yielded anything, in the eight odd years
> I've run mail for domains. RFC-ignorant reminds us they're both
> required addresses, http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/policy-abuse.php Those
> RFCs were written in a time before significant spam however. Turning
> off these addresses at SMTP time would be a solid win in cutting CPU &
> network usage.

The most effective of my several layers of antispam fascism is the huge
list of networks which I just won't talk to.  Compared to that, not
accepting mail to postmaster would be insignificant.

> What's the prevailing attitude these days? I'm particularly curious to
> hear from people who are serving old/many domains were spam is more
> than just irritating, it's a resource issue.

It's certainly a resource issue for me.  If they manage to actually talk
to my server, anything to postmaster or abuse goes through the same
filtering as my personal mail, with the exception that it will *always*
look (from the sender's point of view) as if it is really delivered.
Even if it gets delivered to /dev/null.

I still think that having a working postmaster address is essential, and
it really should be read by a human.  For small hosts, having an abuse
address is less important.

-- 
David Cantrell | Enforcer, South London Linguistic Massive

   The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons