Re: [anti-spam-wg@localhost] Re: failure notice
- Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 13:07:19 +0100
> 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
