Peggy, it is very common for spammers to used forged email address of
legitimate users. When you bounce the email, you are inadvertently
returning the mail to an innocent person. If enough people bounce the email
you end up mail bombing the wrong person.

Check out grc.spam for more info on the problems with bouncing email. Many
people in this group like Mailwasher, but it universally agreed that
bouncing email rarely if ever gets to the person who is actually sending out
the spam.


"Peggie Hall" wrote in message
...
Jack Meholf wrote:
Don't bounce the email, very very rarely will the address be legitimate.
All you will be doing is contributing to the number of useless email
being
bounced around.

I dunno, Jack... All the spam from spammers' website domains is
bounceable. I sometimes check to see if a domain exists and what it
is...and it's inevitably a "direct marketer's" website. The only ones
that aren't bounceable are from spoofed AOL, Earthlink, MSN, Yahoo etc.
I don't try...I just instruct Mailwasher to delete 'em.

Ironically, at least 90% of the spammers using spoofed email addresses
seem to be using Yahoo addresses. I say ironically because my ISP (SBC,
which is an alliance of most, if not all, of the Bells west of the MS
river) allied with Yahoo about a year ago...my POP server address
changed to sbc.yahoo.com, which means that all email goes through Yahoo
servers. It may be unrealistic to expect Yahoo to be able to block
incoming mail using spoofed AOL, MSN etc addresses...but one would THINK
that Yahoo SHOULD have the technology to recognize and block incoming
email from non-existant Yahoo accounts...especially if it's a zillion
emails from the same sender. How tough can it be to install software
that matches Yahoo return addresses against account lists?

Peggie
----------
Peggie Hall
Specializing in marine sanitation since 1987
Author "Get Rid of Boat Odors - A Guide To Marine Sanitation Systems and
Other Sources of Aggravation and Odor"
http://www.seaworthy.com/html/get_ri...oat_odors.html