On Message with Ben Gross

My sometime colleague David Ferris offers this perspective on bounce control:

IronPort’s Nice New Bounce Control:

Bounced spam is a big and growing problem. What happens is that the
spammer sends out email purporting to have you as the sender. Many of
the emails sent get bounced back — to you. These
bounces-as-a-result-of-forgery are a major cause of irritating backscatter.

Controlling
bounced spam is difficult. It’s hard for anti-spam products to tell
what’s spam that’s being bounced, as opposed to bona fide email that
ends up being bounced back because you mistyped the email address, for
example.

IronPort has just released a very nice new feature that
should significantly reduce the phony bounced spam that its customers
receive, and help users receive the valid bounces that they want/need
to see. It’ll also significantly reduce help desk calls — users get
perplexed by bounce messages for email they didn’t send.

Simply
put, IronPort automatically stamps outgoing email with a watermark*. It
then checks incoming bounced email. If it’s got the watermark, the
email is let through. It’s based on an IETF draft, Bounce Address Tag Validation (BATV). IronPort’s an early player to adopt this; expect others to do so. …

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