My mail to ... @jensbenecke.de was rejected! What's up?

ARGH!! SPAMMER!

Unfortunately, though I own the domain jensbenecke.de, I don't accept mail for it any more. This domain has been absolutely swamped with spammers. I get about 500-1000 mails a day only to this domain, and half of it is spam, the other half are auto-replies to spam (or complaints about spam) that was sent somewhere else with my domain in the Return-Path but never originated from me.

Thus, you cannot any more send mail to ...@jensbenecke.de. Spammers, heard that? If you want to send me mail, stick "jens" in front of "spamfreemail.de" and off you go. Depending on from where you send me mail, you may have to confirm that you are a legitimate sender, by replying to a control mail which you get the first time you send me something. This prevents my mailbox from getting congested with even more SPAM.

This also means that all mail from anyone @jensbenecke.de is forged and most likely SPAM or a virus. I do not use this domain any more for e-mail. You can put it in your block lists if you want.

I am a postmaster and my virus / SPAM complaints are being rejected!

Yes. That is because our users cannot send virii or trojans. We do not allow attachments or mail parts that can contain malicious code (AT ALL, so yes, we are sure about that) and our experience shows that in the last four years, every single virus warning our users received was a fake, delivered by a mail server whose naive administrator thought it to be a good idea to believe what the virus used as a sender address.

And, even if one of our users does get infected: Current viruses can't use the SMTP server configured in the mail client, and therefore run their own SMTP engine, which cannot authenticate to our server. So those mails cannot be sent through us!

Postmasters, read this: There is NO virus that uses the address it really came from as "From:" in its mails. That's because it usually cannot access the address at all. So the argument "but we need to send virus notices to notify our customers they are infected" is bullshit, because not a single one of these notices ever reach the user actually infected. The only way of dealing with such viruses is to reject them at the SMTP level before they are accepted into the mail queue.

So, the ONLY way to deal even with your own customers is to scan the mail during the SMTP conversation (i.e. while it is still being sent to you) and reject it outright if it is infected.

My mail to some other address was rejected! What's up?

It seems that your target email address is listed in our blacklist. If you think this is an error, please send me a mail to the above address and we'll clear it up. See here for more details.