Over the past couple of weeks I’ve started getting messages like this from the SourceForge:
Your membership in the mailing list whatever has been disabled due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated 15-Sep-2007.
It’s true – the systems that handle my mail do generate a number of SMTP time rejects for open posting SourceForge lists. My mail server does SMTP time rejection of some spam and these lists don’t appear to have much in the way of spam filtering. It’s a bit depressing since the main problem appears to be limited filtering on the SourceForge side which renders the lists in question rather difficult to read but it’s unsurprising given the nature of the service.
I know the feeling, but there is an answer (at least for sendmail/postfix).
I use MimeDefang, a milter that provides the full power, and horror, of perl.
The solution is to treat the sourceforge server , Debian servers, etc. as valid forwarders (just like a non-owned backup MX): simply drop mails marked as virus/spam from these hosts – and only do rejects for directly submitted mail.
Oh, I’m aware of how I could work around the problem if I could be bothered to.
It’s only SourceForge that I’m actually having trouble with – things like the Debian servers don’t give me a problem since they have sufficiently good spam filtering for it to be rare for anything to get through which triggers the fairly lax SMTP time filtering I do.