Re: Bouncing Spam

The PINE bounce command works nicely for training some spam filters.

The difficulty with the approach you describe is that the vast majority of
spam does not have a valid return address that can be discerned by
software. As a result, many of your wife's 'bounces' will just annoy the
person whose email address was forged on the original spam. Better to
invest in a good spam filter or use an ISP who includes one. Abaca,
Barracuda, Postini, Brightmail are all examples of credible commercial
offerings. Something on the order of 2000 spams a week are filtered by the
product I use with about 20 false negatives and 2-3 false positives per
week.

On Sun, 18 Mar 2007, Ellad Tadmor wrote:

>
> HI-
>
> The Apple mail application has a nice feature for dealing with spam. You
> can "bounce" a message back to its origin with the (false) information
> that your email account does not exist ("User unknown"). It doesn't always
> work, but in some cases the system sending out the spam will remove your
> "incorrect" email address from its list, resulting in a reduction in
> future spam. (My wife tested this theory and did observe a reduction in
> spam.)
>
> I'm wondering whether a similar feature exists in pine. I know there is a
> bounce command in pine - but it works differently. It simply forwards the
> message to a new email address as if it never came to you. This is not the same
> thing as Apple's bounce.
>
> Any information would be appreciated.
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