Kinder, gentler spam eradication
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Once upon a time I would reject spammers willy nilly. This resulted in "backscatter black listing" of my mail server due to the bandwidth sucked up by those drastic email rejection policies for which I opted.
I decided that the reject feature of my mail server wasn't the answer.
So with an FTP pass to the workstation then a global search and replace edit all of a sudden I became a discard fanatic which did not result in any of the backscatter blacklist generating traffic.
No one was the wiser regarding my disdain for the cockroaches sending unsolicited business oriented email.
My next step happened years down the road. I extracted an exhaustive list of top level domains and now routinely discard everything which is not the main subset in use.
I remember when domains became able to contain non UTF-8 characters and hit a open source level "less control" access. TLDs were revamped because ICANN in all it's wisdom failed to realize that the plethora of generic TLDs would be primarily utilized for spamming the world. This has now become reality.
So I refreshed my personal list of all TLD names and my mail server now checks each domain of the incoming email. If it's not an approved TLD it is simply discarded. Blissful coexistence with all the spammer cockroaches out there in the ether ...
I no longer bounce spam back to the sender and incur the wrath of the rest of those serving that internet traffic impeded by my bandwidth taxing attempts at vindictive action.
Que Sera Sera.
See Also:
Spam Crazy End of Year Attack of the mail server discards Spam blocklists and company due diligence Contact Forms and Spammers SMTP and POP Idiocy Clickbait Everywhere The Unsophisticated Purveyor of Exploits Spammers are Stupid I Routinely Firewall Data Centers Effective Filtration The Barrage of Holiday Spam pavlovmedia spammer ring Spammers Who Feel Slighted Spammers Operating from Residential Nodes Practicalities of running an Email Server