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

[Piet Beertema <]

> > 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.
You're right. From a viewpoint of security, trustability and spam-
fighting a message-id should be considered mandatory. Whether you
should bounce a mail though that has no message-id or contains one
that is non-RFC-conformant is subject to discussion. Personally I
don't bounce them, but I treat them as spam and silently discard
them. A warning might be better, but why should I educate spammers?


        Piet