EMail Bouncers

  • Thread starter Thread starter AAH
  • Start date Start date
schrodinger's cat said:
You are wrong. Any reduction you have seen in junk mail has nothing to
do with your bouncing the mail. I think you do not understand. When
you bounce junk mail, you are *NOT* sending it back to the junk
mailer. You are *NOT* clogging up their email. Almost all of these
people use fake email return addresses, for the very purpose of
avoiding bounced messages, so your bounces never get back to them.
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Actually, I was of the impression that a lot of Nigeria-scam-type spam uses
valid reply addresses. Typically some free web-based type discardable mail
account (Hotmail etc), which probably gets shut down by the time most people
get to read the spam in the first place.
It
is now widely considered to be bad behavior to bounce junk mail due
to the reasons that have been explained to you, mostly because it
simply adds to internet traffic and slows down servers who have to
process your bounces.
Click to expand...

Agreed. People running high-capacity spam networks, or even controlling
botnets, never use correct reply addresses in the first place. They only
want to direct you to some web page or whatever, which is totally unrelated
to the mail address. If the address is real (as mentioned above) abuse is
probably more effective than bounce. And if you _do_ bounce: Please make
goddamn sure that the "From:" address is the senders actual address.

Bounce mails from your ex-girlfriend if you like. But systematically and
uncritically bouncing every single unwanted mail has disadvantages which by
far outweighs any possible advantages.
Even worse, if the junk mailer has hijacked a
real person's email address, you are causing that innocent person an
incredible amount of bother because you are sending the messages back
to him/her instead of to the junk mailer.
Click to expand...

I have not experienced this much with commercial type spam. However, I have
at times received significant amounts of bounce e-mails from mail servers
claiming to have found some kind of virus in mails sent by "me".
 
< snip >

Thanks for letting us know your policy. Now when a spammer uses your
address as the return address we will know that you want us to return
all the spam to you.
Click to expand...

It's funny but most of the e-mails I bounce do not get bounced back to
me. If they do I simply delete them rather than initiating another
bounce.
 
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