I've just noticed a domain of mine has been blacklisted by backscatterer.org. Time to investigate.
When you go here:
http://www.backscatterer.org/index.php?target=backscatter
it describes the behaviour it wants to dictate, and because google, yahoo, and others are blacklisting domains blacklisted by this group, this pretty much dictates everyone's behaviour.
What this says is that you must reject (i.e. 550) email to unknown users. If you don't, then it assumes that you must be bouncing NDRs to potentially innocent victims.
The second sentence doesn't, in fact, follow from the first.
However, I don't want to do either of these things. I neither want to reject nor bounce. The simple reason being that a client or prospect might mistype the email address and I want a chance to pick these up.
What I do is accept all emails, then pass unknown users through procmail and send spam to /dev/null. Those that pass go to a catch all account.
My behaviour seems fine to me. Why is backscatterer.org permitted to dictate policy to this degree. And why doesn't it inform you that it has borked your email. And why is it permitted to extort €76 to "release" your domain from its clutches.
Or am I missing something and inadvertently being a bad net citizen?