I use MailWasher to screen my email. I, like many of you, get a bunch of spam daily. Mailwasher will bounce the emails from your ISP server…they never actually make it onto your machine (AFAIK…I an certainly no expert!)
I tried bouncing an email from my work addy and it looked just like I had sent an email to an invalid address.
But now that I have it set up, 99% of all the spam gets blacklisted and bounced from my ISP’s server when I run Mailwasher, but it is also 99% addresses that I have gotten spam from before. If getting an “invalid email address” response isn’t deterring these spammers, it’s just as bad as answering the damn spam as far as I can tell.
So I ask you SDMB email gurus…should I just delete the spam and not bounce it??
My experience with Mailwasher: I’d just installed it, when my ISP tech asked me to set it without the bounce function, as apparently when I bounced spam, it would usually ricochet out there in the ether and land back at my ISP . . . and they had enough spam to deal with already.
My brother’s experience: after he’d had it awhile, he thought he noticed a decrease in spam from blacklisted sources - he presumed the bounce function was responsible.
Off-topic/hijack: Unless you’re trying to protect your young’uns from the dreck, I can’t see any big reason to use a spam-avoiding program – you still have to look at the to/from/subject of any e-mail to make sure you’re not deleting the good with the bad, whether it’s on Mailwasher or your regular e-mail program.
Nah, I just wanted to have the satisfaction of saying “UP YOURS” .
Mailwasher does keep a running tab of the sources of spam, and I rarely get an email from somebody not on my “Friends” list, so I only have a very few emails that are either not on the “Blacklist” or “Friends” list. This makes quick work of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
I also like the fact that none of the crap ever makes it on to my machine. It also will clue you in about viruses…some of which may not be on my not-often-enough-updated anti-virus. For example…I recently got an email form support@microsoft.com with the subject “The Screen Saver you Requested” and a file attachment size of 178kb. I could zap that POS from the server.
So it’s probably not necessary, may not help, but I do like being able to delete the crap from my ISP’s server and not let it touch my machine.
I’m like a man in the dark, blindly stabbing at the eyes of the heartless spammers. If I can just gouge out a single eyeball now and then, I am a happy warrior!
The problem is that you’re also gouging a lot of innocent bystanders. As Severian pointed out, most of the reply-to addresses in your spam are spoofed. My mailservers routinely get deluged with bounce messages after some spammer uses one of my domain names in a forged header. The bounces are followed quickly by loads of hate mail from people who are angry about getting spam but too stupid to know who to target with their reply. Many of these repliers are so thick they can’t even understand my politely-worded response explaining that the spam they got had a forged header and didn’t really come from me, and they continue to bombard me with vile attacks. Not to rant, but people who make an effort to reply to spam with anything, bounce or complaint, are clueless at best.
Sigh… you have to wonder about human nature. I mean, we’ve come up with probably the most widespread, cheapest, fastest, easiest-to-use system of communication ever, and a minority of numbskulls forces us to find ways to block it up and hinder free use.
Sorry, not adding anything to the debate; just my Friday-afternoon philosphising.
Philosophizing is worthwhile and I agree with you, but I’d add that this is hardly the first time we’ve seen this. Self-centered behavior and ignoring the consequences of your actions is pretty basic human nature, and most of our laws and cultural mores are designed to protect the masses who can constrain their behavior from the few who cannot.
IMO, the problem is not that spammers take advantage of the system, but that the original designers were idealists who never considered that this was inevitable. The designers of SMTP didn’t bother to add features like sender verification and authenticated headers because they didn’t forsee the potential misuse and, in fact, the system operated for years with little or no misuse because access was limited to people who generally respect other people. When the system was opened to the masses, people who had no respect for others gained access and the inevitable occurred. The moral of the story is that any system which relies on the end-user to constrain their own behavior, whether it’s email or an automobile throttle, is subject to abuse and you can either live with the consequences or design the system to constrain the user. I’m not giving the spammers a pass or excusing their behavior; I’m just saying that it’s not unexpected that these lowlifes exploit the system and we should get over our shock that it happens and deal with them as we would deal with anyone else who imposes this kind of burden on other people.
I’m gonna try the plain old delete. I’m not trying to piss off the whole world. I’m not the one sending out the spam. Maybe if enough people get as pissed off as your customers, we can band together and gouge the eyes from spammers once and for all.
Hell, bouncing them and pissing off hosts might be the anti-spam we’ve been looking for! (Only joking…I know you are not to blame for this spam crap.)
That was, after all, what I was asking in the OP. And I did, after all, offer up the fact that I was clueless.
Thank you for taking the time to address both these issues.
Sorry if my comments were snarky or seemed like an attack on you. I certainly didn’t mean them that way. I get a little worked up about this because my mailserver gets pegged every now and then because some spammer uses my domain in his headers, and I end up spending a lot of time and a lot of money for beefed up hardware and bandwidth. The verbal attacks against me when I try to explain to the replies just adds insult to injury, but that’s not even an issue here since you were just talking about bouncing the mail.
No sweat micco…just reinforces how insidious this spam has become. Every single person on the face of the Earth (except spammers) loaths and detests it, but it seems to be thriving.
I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you were being snarkey if I have been doing something to make the situation worse.
May I ask a legal/ethical/technical question? I’ve been looking over today’s catch of legal-like Viagra and minicam offers.
Most of the non-porno spam that I get (I don’t look at the porno stuff–I know where to find that, thankyouverymuch) directs the reader to a specific link, often a numbered IP address, right?
Can I legally set up a program to bounce the spam to that specific address and any e-mail addresses associated with it? Is it feasible to do it automatically?
They paid to have that crap generated and sent to me. If I can create a program that identifies where a response is supposed to go, why can’t I send all that shit straight back to them? The idea would be to harm the spam-financier’s business model by making them wade through their own garbage.
Sofa I think it is pretty clear that you can legally bounce a reply to the link in email. After all the whole spam problem exists the way it does now because there are no laws about who you can send emails to. As for technical feasibility I think it is not very feasible. A web link is not an email address and spammers are unlikely to be monitoring abuse@www.getrichquick_through_spamming.com and taking corrective action. If it gets to be enough of a problem they could just turn off that emial account it is not like they get anything that they need to read there. You need to figure out an email address that they get legitimate mail to and then send them junk. I don’t think there is a good way to do that automatically.