Bonn Feds Forego Bounce

CK - Washington.   Fighting spam by ignoring rules: The Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology, BSI, advises government agencies to forego bounce messages which the internet-technology rules for receiving mail servers, RFCs 821 and 2821, require. As a result, mistyped addresses in communications to such agencies will not trigger an error message to the sender. A Heise investigation explains that the BSI action represents a response to spam. Spammers can fake email addresses and, through the bounce-notification system, can make recipients of spam believe the government would communicate with them when, in fact, the message originates from an unwanted source. According to Heise, Bonn-based BSI justifies its violation of the SMTP RFCs with the need to fight spam and virus-payloads, to keep government servers from becoming blacklisted on spam-fighting lists, to avoid having the general population confused by spam mails ostensibly originating with the government and to ignore a now-inappropriate standard conceived before the rise of spam. Some agencies accept mail with mistyped addresses, others simply drop it. Load and performance concerns do no…