Comments on: Don’t Bounce Spam

By: Chad

Chad — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:42:53 +0000

A huge problem I found out with using the Bounce command too much, is that the spammers might then hijack your supposedly “invalid” account, and then use your e-mail account as the reply to address when they spam people.

I had one of my accounts hijacked and I ended up getting around 200 pieces of bounce backs as other places thought I was sending out the spam.

Fortunately, after a number of months, this finally died down, and the excess bounce backs are in the low numbers, about as bad as my regular spam.

By: Tom Harrington

Tom Harrington — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:44:18 +0000

Oh wait, that was mentoned, never mind…

By: Tom Harrington

Tom Harrington — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:43:30 +0000

Worst of all, and something I’m surprised wasn’t mentioned is that the return address is probably forged, so if you bounce it, you’re effectively forwarding the spam to some innocent and unlucky bystander. I’ve had no shortage of spam bounces come to me after some well-meaning but misguided person decided to return the message to the apparent sender (me) without regard for whether that person was the actual sender. Bouncing in this case not only fails to reduce your own spam, but makes the problem worse by forwarding the message on.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:38:30 +0000

I know another reason not to use the Bounce command. I used to use it, and my mail provider at the time suspended my account because they thought I was running a mail server (violation of TOS) and had misconfigured it. They reinstated me after I explained that no, I don’t have a mail server, it’s the Bounce command in my mail client.

I haven’t used the Bounce command since.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:25:25 +0000

Thanks, Chris. The problem is I want all the convenience and design elegance of SpamSieve. I used to run SpamAssassin on my server but I got wooed by SpamSieve simply because it has a Mac design mentality that I agree with.

By: Chris Ryland

Chris Ryland — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:22:51 +0000

Daniel, DSPAM is really the ultimate spam solution for Unix servers of any flavor. (I run it on my Xserve box.) It does require some fairly good Unix sysadmin skills, but once set up, it catches 98+% of all spam (about 2K messages a day in my company's case). It's open source, mature, and well-supported on the mailing list. It has the advantage of working at the source, if you run your own servers.

By: Michael Tsai

Michael Tsai — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:57:19 +0000

Though SpamSieve doesn't run on Unix servers, it is possible to use a Mac as a spam filtering server and train it removely from one or more Macs or iPhones.