[thelist] Will bouncing spam really help?

[Sarah Sweeney]

Related to the SpamCop discussion going on... I recently found a program
called MailWasher (and there are other programs like this, which I did not
know) which allows you to preview the email on your server, and if the mail
is spam, you can "bounce" the email as though your email address does not
exist. I have often read that the only way to reduce spam (as opposed to
using "unsubscribe" links provided in spam) is for the emails to get
bounced, and eventually spammers will remove your email address from their
lists. But is this really true? Will spammers actually go to the trouble of
removing non-existent email addresses from their lists, or do they even
care? It seems likely to me that they would not care (evil *******s that
they are), but I have read this bit of advice so often that I can't help
but wonder - will bouncing spam actually help to get my email address
removed from spammers' lists?

Sarah