"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in
:

James Sweet wrote:

I'm in the US and I despise spam, more than one email address I've had
has been rendered useless by the enormous volume of spam that makes it
in. I've had much better luck since I switched to gmail and set up a
number of disposable email forwards through trashmail.net, now whenever
I start getting spam from one, I can just drop it and switch to another.


I use 'Mailwasher' to bounce the garbage as undeliverable.

NO!!!!!
NEVER bounce mail unless you can _guarantee_ that it goes to the ACTUAL
sender!!!!

Bouncing mail is an abuse of the INTERNET and should NEVER be done.

What if [as is very common] the spammer is using a forged return / senders
address????
You end up clobbering some innocent soul's inbox.

Some spammers purposely use bouncers to 'forward' their spam.

Many viruses use bouncers or even faked bounces to try to get their virus
infected e-mail to someone that will open it.
http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html


If they
are expecting to do business with their email address, the more bounced
mail, the better to plug their inbox and prevent real customers from
contacting them.

..... snipped a case where bouncing WAS justified. Such cases are very rare.

Usually it is better to report spammers to their ISP and let the ISP deal
with them. If you do ANYTHING to let the spammer know that your e-mail
address works, you are just inviting them to sell your address to other
spammers.

By the way, spamcop can be used to report spam. Sometimes it helps.


--
bz

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap