classiccmp list (sort of) help requested

"Jay West" wrote: not sure. I'll tell you what you probably already know. Spam has been morphing lately on a couple of fronts. People who don't run their own SMTP servers have probably only noticed one of these fronts - the move to pictures embedded in mime encoded email. No Bayes classifier can deal with that (that I know of). Another front is the rise of spambots. I've seen a huge increase in "SMTP hangups", where a connection occurs and then is dropped. It's spambots fishing. Also, tons of email sent to non-existent users at valid domains. These cause double bouncing and clog up email servers. I've seen hundreds of them running all over (what appear to be) cable modem nets in the UK. And other places as well (no slight ment to those across the pond - just one of many examples). There must a lot of infected pc's running windows out there. I've taken to rejecting email at the SMTP level by checking the recipient - using a qmail variant called magic-smtpd. It's eliminated the double-bounces caused by email sent from non-existent users to non-existent users. But, the checking requires you to keep a list of valid email recipients. This is probably not practical for many domains but it might work for a list/domain where you know the list of valid recipients up front. Just a thought. The sad thing is that email is quickly becoming less effective than fax and the phone. A high percentage of email is filtered or lost. very frustrating. -brad