On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 22:52:18 GMT, Peggie Hall wrote:

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.

I bought Mailwasher Pro partly because of its ability to bounce spam, presumably
back to the sender's server. It is a controversial subject.

I was bouncing for about 60 days, but stopped; the amount of spam I was getting
did not decrease a bit, so I figured I wasn't doing anyone a favor (especially
myself) any favors by adding to the bandwidth congestion. It also slows down
the program. That load may not be an issue for someone getting, say. 50 or 100
spams a day, but I get around a *thousand* a day. For me, it's an issue.

I'm able to deal with almost all of it (with very few false positives) by using
a combination of three live "blackhole" databases, 3,200 blacklist entries that
expire after 15 days of non-use and a set of filters that I downloaded from the
Wailwasher forum. Most of the filters delete spam immediately without any input
from me.

Some ISPs do provide filters for their users, but the fact is that those kinds
of filters *will* catch legitimate e-mail.

I'm just not willing to consider that as an option.

But anyone who's looking for a spam solution would do well to give Mailwasher a
good look!

Joe Parsons

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