At 04:43 PM 8/16/00, Martin J. Lang wrote:
>hey poppers...
>
>a program was mentioned this morning on seeknfind, called "bounce spam mail"
>(available at <http://www.er.uqam.ca/merlin/fg591543/bsm/>). supposedly,
>you can use it to send a "realistic" bounce message back to spammers that
>will cause their automated mailing thingies to delete your email address
>from the list.
>
>does anyone have any experience with this or similar programs? does it (do
>they) work? since so much spam includes the phony <reply to remove>
>notice--which is the surest way to ensure that you'll receive more
>spam...i'm reluctant to experiment.
Such a program would probably have limited results. The reason is clear
when you think about it:
Most spammers use throw-away accounts or hacked accounts as the "sending"
address. The reason is that most spam runs generate thousands or even
millions of bounces due to the way that spammers gather addresses. Most
don't look at bounces or purge their address lists in any way. Because
there is no cost to sending out email for your typical spammer (or at
least, no cost difference between 1000 and 1000000), they have little
incentive to remove "bad" addresses. So, your "fake" bounce message would
be lost in a see of other bounces, and ignored anyway.
A better method is to start complaining about all your spams. You might
get some satisfaction by getting spammers terminated, and you also might
get listed on the lists that spammers circulate of "do not spam" addresses
- they learn that if they spam certain addresses, they're sure to get nuked
fast.
Two web pages I would recommend to cut down on your spam - the first is
<http://www.spamcop.net> which will help you report your spam. The second
is my anti-spam information page where you can learn about spam fighting
and find more tools to help you - it's at <http://www.rassi.com/antispam.html>
