Before anyone gets the wrong idea from my last response to Abigail, I have the greatest respect for Abigail and her skills, knowledge, and integrity. On most points, she and I are generally of the same opinion. I may disagree with her on this particular point, but we are looking at it from two entirely different perspectives - she from a corporate administrative view and I from a personal home user view. I just wanted to make that clear up front. :)
Abigail, you make excellent points. I still believe that MailWasher Pro has a more sophisticated bouncing engine than the free version and that the articles you previously pointed me to were written about the free version - MailWasher Pro really hasn't even been out that long.
I also don't believe bouncing the message back to the 'sender' does any harm to the SMTP server. And no, MailWasher Pro does not send the message back to MailWasher for 'processing'. It creates the 'bounced' message on my computer, uses my mail servers for sending them, and does not send it if the address is found to be or suspected to be fraudulent.
I, too, use my own email client - you use The Bat!, I use Eudora - to read and respond to messages. What I was saying about MailWasher Pro is that you can have a 'preview' pane open directly below your 'spreadsheet-like' listing of the headers. When MailWasher Pro downloads the headers, it grabs the first 21 lines of the message. That way, you only have to click a header to see the beginning of the message to determine if it is something you want or not. Sure, you can click a button to have it retrieve the entire text of the message if you like, but it doesn't do it automatically.
I also agree with you that reporting spam is the 'practical' way of dealing with it - I don't have that much time to spend reporting it constantly, though. MailWasher Pro gives me a psychological boost by giving me the feeling that I am shoving it back at them "where the sun don't shine". Sure, by turning my error reporting off and not seeing the list of all those that *didn't* get bounced, it's a false presumption, but it still *feels good*!
Now another example of *personal* experience. Sure, it could just as well be nothing more than coincidence, but it's an awfully big coincidence, if it is!
I began getting the SoBig.F worm bounces at a rate of around a dozen per hour or more around 10:a.m. Tuesday morning. For the first 30 hours or so, I merely deleted them with MailWasher Pro from my server without ever having to take the time to download the 30 meg or better of infected files.
At around 5:p.m. last evening, I was getting tired of it! I decided to start bouncing the bounces back to the bouncers! I bet you gasped at that, huh?! ;-) I didn't really think it would do any good... after all, I was just bouncing them back to another MAILER- DAEMON, wasn't I? Actually, some had that, others had "Postmaster", and still others had something like "Notification" in the "From:" addresses.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I got maybe 25 more bounces between when I started bouncing them back and Midnight last night when I went to bed. I bounced them back. I awoke at 6:a.m. this morning, expecting to see another 70 or 80 bounces waiting for me like the morning before. Guess what? There were only six!!! I bounced those six back and since six o'clock this morning (it's now 8:35 p.m.) I have NOT received a single additional SoBig.F bounce!!!
MailWasher SKUNKS SoBig.F 331 to 0 ! ! ! ! !
I just thought SoBig was winding down until I heard on the 6:p.m. news this evening that it was running stronger today than yesterday! Now tell me that's a coincidence! You can tell me it is, but I won't believe it! :)
Yes, I'm a big fan and believer in MailWasher Pro - it has more than paid for itself in the time it has saved me and I will continue to use it in the way that appears to be working for me. I never try to sell anything I haven't tried myself and found useful. I believe so strongly in the usefulness of MailWasher Pro, that I promote it every chance I get! My spam to good email ratio has dropped from 5 or 6 spams to 1 good, down to around 1 or 2 spams to 1 good. Either MailWasher Pro is doing what it claims to be doing or the spammers are slowing down! Anyone else believe that spammers are slowing? The numbers speak for themselves,
Cheers, Tom
At 04:25 PM 08/21/2003 -0700, you wrote:
On Thursday, August 21, 2003, 2:59:15 PM, Cyberspace Publishing commented:
CP> Abigail, I would tend to agree with you except for one fact that CP> I cannot ignore - since I changed the "From:" address for the CP> bouncing, my spam has *noticeably* decreased!
I do REAL bouncing at the server level, and I don't particularly see decreases as a result of bounces. That is, my logs are still showing spam email to addresses that have been disabled and returning "user unknown" for years. So I think your experience is anecdotal -- it may be true for you, but that doesn't mean it works for others.
CP> I flag everyone I want to receive email from as "Friend" - including CP> everyone in lists I belong to. Everyone else gets bounced - period. :)
You are looking at this issue from the standpoint of being an email recipient. I am looking at it from the standpoint of running an SMTP server for a company doing business internationally and seeing what goes through. Obviously, in my position, your friend-only regimen doesn't work. Bottom line, most of our paying clients start out as strangers; a lot of them send email to us from hotmail or yahoo accounts, and many even have have weird names with numbers after them. AOL is also a big source of paying customers for us. The last thing we want to do is "blacklist" or "bounce" a potential customer. And since we are an international business, we DO get REAL email from Brazil, Russia, China, etc..
I am also using Mailwasher (the free version) to check questionable mail coming through our server as well as my personal email. That is, my spam filtering software sends email that is possible spam to a POP box called Spam - I check Spam with Mailwasher - and I rescue any false positives by downloading them to my email program and then redirecting them to the appropriate user.
CP> If you haven't looked at MailWasher Pro, and are still using the free CP> version, you might want to try the 30 day trial.
No, it really doesn't sound like it offers anything I need. You certainly haven't mentioned anything that sounds enticing, so I'm inclined to stick with what I've got.
CP> MailWasher Pro puts the 'preview' pane directly CP> below the header list pane, so it's a simple matter to quickly check CP> an email and determine if it is spam or not.
If I want to READ the email, my email program does that, plus has sophisticated filtering abilities that far outclass Mailwasher. The reason I use Mailwasher is that I like the neat, uncluttered, spreadsheet-like layout. The pictures of the PRO interface basically don't look too encouraging to me.
CP> If it is - BOUNCED!
No, what happens is that you send it back to Mailwasher, and they generate a message from their servers that might be technically deemed a refusal, not a bounce. Some spammers might remove names upon receiving that message, but they aren't fooled -- I'm sure they can easily recognize a Mailwasher bounce for what it is.
Again, as someone who deals with server administration, I have no fondness whatsoever for excess bounce messages being generated. I favor simply reporting the spammers for abuse to appropriate places, and deleting the spam. If they have spammed you they've spammed 10,000 other people, and rather than 10,000 bounce messages, it makes more sense to pull the plug on wherever they are mailing from.
-Abigail
-------------------------------------------------------- Try MailWasher Pro for 30 days, or grab MailWasher Free! http://entier.ecosm.com/link/?iqbeoyr
Sell MailWasher Pro for 40% Commissions!
http://entier.ecosm.com/join.php?pid=4&aid=2853
--------------------------------------------------------____ • The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM • ____
To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email.
To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version:
http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub
________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________
You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
