My question is in the field of internet and information security: Is
it possible to use the SMTP protocol to distingwish between good and
bad email to prevent email bomb attack?

---

Request for Question Clarification by hammer-ga on 16 Nov 2002 08:41 PST

We could answer this question more effectively if you could define
what YOU consider to be "bad" email.

There's no difference between a good and bad e-mail except for maybe
spoofed headers which appear normal but are fake, or many copies of
e-mails which make up a "bomb" but aren't really bad in and of
themselves.

skermit-ga

I agree with skermit, and to answer your question specifically, you
could probably implement something with the email server to cut off a
certain number of emails per minute from the same location (ip address
or email address) from being accepted. Other than this, I can't think
of anything like what you want.

Are you using sendmail?  If so, you might want to read
http://www.sendmail.org/antispam.html

Or perhaps you're a Microsoft person, in which case you want to get
their Message Screener product and read
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/prodtech/mailexch/opsguide/e2ksec04.asp

Of course, the pure answer to your question is "no" - those sorts of
capabilities are not present in SMTP itself.