Lately I’ve been getting a lot of backscatter spam. Backscatter is the term for when a spammer uses your email address and you get all the bounces. Last night I got about 200 bounce messages, on top of the 1000 spam messages I usually get. The spam is filtered nicely, but the bounce messages head straight for my “in” box.
The reason I like big mail systems is because the administrators usually understand the issues with spam and act to minimize the collateral damage from it. I don’t get backscatter from AOL, Hotmail, or domains served by Postini. I get it from all sorts of little domains and mail servers, where they don’t care enough to do it right. IT isn’t their primary business, and the server configuration works just well enough to get them through the day.
I guess this is why good default configurations are important. Hmm.
I’m not sure why you think Postini is better than anyone else. I just got backscatter from them (a “message delivery failed” message to a message I never sent). I publish SPF records, so they should have been able to determine I never sent the original forged message.