Ferris Research on IronPort's Bounce Control

By Jeff Ubois
in

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…

Published September 1, 2006