Sendmail ignores hosts.allow

[Chuck Swiger]

On May 22, 2007, at 1:21 PM, Maxim Khitrov wrote:
> Do you know if there is a reason they chose to do it this way?   
> Accept the
> connection, but don't allow the client to do anything with it?

There is some advantage to getting enough info from attempted spam to  
produce useful logging messages, even if you want your mail system to  
eventually return a 5xx permanent failure.

Some people also find that accepting and tying up spammer connections  
can help reduce the rate that spam gets pumped out, although for that  
to be really effective, it helps to have a "teergrube" (German for  
"tarpit") in your MX list which is specially designed to very slowly  
accept traffic from potential spammers without tying down a lot of  
your own bandwidth.

-- 
-Chuck