Re: [anti-spam-wg@localhost] Re: failure notice

[der Mouse <]

>> mouse@localhost:
>> 216.46.5.7 failed after I sent the message.
>> Remote host said: 554 No Message-Id: header

> Your mail server is bouncing mail for lack of Message-ID.

Right.

> A Message-ID is not a required field.

Right.

It is, however, a SHOULD (2822 3.6.4).  Also, and apropos to this list,
it is a fairly effective anti-spam check.  I checked my logs back to
2002-10-03 (as far back as it's easy to check, given how I keep those
logs) and there were 288 messages hard-refused because of that check
which would not have been hard-refused for any other reason; 115 of
them would not have been soft-refused either.  Messages refused for
missing message-ID are logged, and I just went through all 288 of them
and looked at them.

Two were real mail.  One of these was yours.

Two were auto-acks from abuse desk addresses.

Nine were real bounces of messages I sent, to sites that accepted them,
bounced them later, and didn't bother putting a message-ID in the
bounce.  Some six or seven of these were from the same site, to which I
sent a small burst of messages without checking for bounces in between.

One was an automated notification from a webcrawler (arguably
borderline spam).

The other 274 were mostly spam, with a few being bounces of mail I
didn't send (sometimes spam, sometimes mail from Klez or its ilk).

The reasonably good rate of spam-stopping, combined with its being a
SHOULD violation, is enough to make me content with the check.

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