Mail Server best practices - was: Pandora's Box of new TLDs

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>So should I have bounced all 4,602?  Since ninety some percent of them  
>came from forged addresses that would not only be pointless but would  
>be contributing to the problem (and get us into bl.spamcop.com).

Of course not.  You should have rejected them.

Note that rejection doesn't keep you from using them to tune your filters.
My MTA does much of its filtering at the end of data, and if it decides
the message isn't going into the nominal recipient's mailbox, it returns
a 553 status, then dumps the message into the spamtrap.

R's,
John