Impact Engineering and Backscatter
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-01-16 05:29:19 - Graham EllisHere are two new technical terms for you that I've run across in the last few days. Can you guess what they refer to, or do you know them already?
Impact Engineering .... hitting a piece of equipment, typically but not always with a hammer or fist, in order to persuade it to work.
Backscatter Those irritating emails that tell you that your email to xxxxx could not be delivered ... when you have never even written to xxxxx in the first place.
Backscatter is typically caused when mail servers reject bulk emails that have been sent out by a 'spammer' or spamming program that's pretending to be you in their email address. As postmaster for a number of domains, my mailbox tends to collect quite a bit of backscatter; some of the spammers make up "from" addresses at known domains and I get those in addition to the more sophisticated ones that have hijacked one of our true addresses.
Recently, I've noticed a disturbing trend in services which are offering to protect their clients from spam by asking the originator to confirm that they're genuine. The very fact that these services ask means that they're highly sceptical about the original email, so they KNOW they're generating backscatter. "An unfortunate side effect of our system" one wrote to me. Hmm; if the service knows that the sender address is probably forged, isn't it generating an unsolicited email when it writes to the true owner of that address to ask about it>. And if the service is charging clients for its automated activity , doesn't that make its backscatter emails into unsolicited bulk commercial email?
Yes, these people believe that it's all right for them to send out spam ... in the very act of discouraging others from doing so. One rule for you, and another for me? Ick!