backscatter mail

I’m considering migrating from JunkMatcher to SpamSieve, partly because of the Python RegExp bug mentioned in the evaluating switch from JunkMatcher thread.

I’m also wondering if SpamSieve can effectively detect an ever-increasing amount of backscatter mail. I’m aware there are server-side methods for handing backscatter but I don’t have enough control over my current MX/SMTP servers to do that. I use fetchmail to retrieve messages from those servers, which invokes procmail to do some local filtering so maybe that’s a better spot to inject some sort of backscatter filtering than using SpamSieve? I do have the ability to run procmail on the MX servers but would prefer not having too many dependencies there since I might eventually switch servers.

Spam was quite manageable for me until the scourge of backscatter started hitting more heavily a few months. What makes it so troublesome is not being able to visually discriminate infrequent (but important) valid “MAILER-DAEMON” responses from all the rest. I’m still learning what role (if any) client-side filtering should have in dealing with this problem. Thanks for any help to resolve or at least better understand it.

I’m not sure that you need any special server handling. For me, SpamSieve reliably separates the backscatter from the genuine bounces.