[RFCI-Discuss] refusing mail to abuse@ if not the only recipient

[James Hess]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Matus UHLAR - fantomas
<uhlar at fantomas.sk> wrote:
> - since abuse@ mail must be supported
> - since spammers can try to avoid filtering by using other recipients along
>  with abuse@ to avoid rejecting spam
> they are using technique, that either abuse@ or other recipients are being
> temporarily refused at SMTP time,

Of course this type of rejection seems to be valid...  in fact (well),
a site can be fully compliant with  STD 10  and all current internet
standards,  and not have  any  valid  abuse@   address.

There's a standards-track RFC which  aimed  to standardize mailboxes
for certain services,  including  abuse@,   that would  be  RFC 2142
http://www.ietf.org/download/rfc-index.txt

2142 Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions. D.
     Crocker. May 1997. (Format: TXT=12195 bytes) (Status: PROPOSED
     STANDARD)


However,  that RFC has not yet reached the formal status of internet
standard. RFC 2142 is still only a proposed standard,  and could  very
well be superceded.
It is conceivable that the practice of deferring or blocking mail to
abuse@    according to local policy  (and spam prevention) could be
banned, but it is not currently  de-facto standard not to do so.

For  those who choose to implement the  2142 proposed standard as
proposed (so far),  they only need to have  abuse@  be a valid mailbox
 that can (eventually) accept some mail  (and blacklisting unwanted
senders is not precluded).


In any case,  STD 10   has  not been revised  to make  the
implementation of the additional mailboxes  such as  abuse@
mandatory.

At the current time abuse@  is a de-facto standard many sites implement.
So  it is quite difficult to say  definitively what may  or may not be valid
based on a  de-facto standard,   that doesn't have anything near close
to universal implementation.

--
-J