[thelist] Will bouncing spam really help?

[Koutoulas, Pete]

On Thursday, February 13, 2003 11:19 AM, Sarah Sweeney wrote:

> 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

Sarah, I tried MailWasher and it didn't seem to help. When you think about
it, what are the chances that the spam has a legit return address to bounce
it to? In fact, most have no valid return address at all and a few spoof
your own as the return address!

    [ pete ]

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