Hotmail needs to add this feature

[Jayn_Newell]

Or, Wow, I have a lot of dead e-mails in my address book. (Not quite a rant)

I got hit by a virus or two today. So, I'm trying to do the right thing, sending out an e-mail to my whole contact list to let them know. I've never really cleaned it out, so there's a lot of people there that I never talk to anymore, and quite a few dead addresses.

For every. Single. Dead address, I had to go in, find it (in a line of 50, not all in alphabetical order), delete it, then hit send again. I probably did this about 20 times (I had to send two e-mails, because there's a limit on how many people I can send one message too.).

Why couldn't Hotmail just send it out to the addresses that exist, then let me know which ones don't, so I could delete them from my address book? It would be so much easier.

Yes, I cleaned out my address book after I was done.

*checks e-mail before hitting submit*

Great, I think this has a rotating message too, somehow it got sent back to myself, and the message is different than the one I read. Doesn't even sound like me, but a lot of my contacts wouldn't realise that. My friend said it was a good one, and I'm inclined to agree--after all, I did get taken in. Hopefully no one else does.

[ftg]

Originally Posted by Jayn_Newell

Why couldn't Hotmail just send it out to the addresses that exist, then let me know which ones don't, so I could delete them from my address book? It would be so much easier.

Because this would be really, really, really bad. It is possible to set things up on a mail server so email to a nonexistent email address bounces back to the sender indicating the account is invalid. Actually doing this has horrendous consequences:

1. Spammers would send email to as many accounts at a site as possible. They would run thru all short accounts names as well as using a dictionary of account names collected from other sites (e.g., "jsmith" is always a good guess). The bounce backs would tell them which accounts are bad and therefore the rest are good and those would get bombarded with spam.

2. The "bounce back" aspect would also not work. The spammers would send to a known not-good account on the email server with a forged "from" address as the intended target. The server would then bounce the email to the spammer's target rather than back to the spammer. A while back spammers went searching thru the Net looking for such bouncing email servers. Once found, they exploited this "feature" to relay their spam. I used to get a lot of "rejected emails" that I had never sent. All spam. Such sites are now fixed or blocked.

I can also think of several other ways such a system can be exploited but you should get the idea.