Norton no longer sends out spam warning

Symantec has announced that the new version of their Mail Security product will no longer send out messages to those that sent spam letting them know that it felt that they had sent the mail in error.

This is a big deal since this previous behavior creates more of a problem than the original spam in the first place. By sending out that response e-mail, it generated more network traffic, and occasionally would generate more spam from the original source.
If an e-mail was sent from an account that was since killed off by the ISP, then the automated mail sent to them letting them know that their message was not wanted would then get bounced back with a non-delivery statement.
So the original message generates multiple messages... which adds up quickly if you have even a small number of users getting spam.

This is nice to see that Symantec seems to either be logically thinking through their feature sets, or they are (even better) listening to requests/complaints of their installed user base.

Posted by Eric at May 10, 2004 11:42 AM | TrackBack