Thread: How to Bounce spam?

I get a lot of emails but some of the spam messages,are a nuisance. Can I 'bounce' these messages back to the spammer without opening them in my email program so the spammer does not know whether I have received the message?

You can, yes, but there may not be much point. The free Mailwasher program allows users to do just that. It sits between your email server and your own email program (such as Windows Mail or Outlook Express) and catches all mail as it comes in. At that point you can choose which email to keep and which to throwaway. In addition to just deleting the sparn you'll be given the option to bounce it back to the sender so that it looks to them like your email address no longer exists.

The advantage, in theory, of doing this is that the spammer will see that your address doesn't exist and take you off the list. In practice it doesn't work like that, though, because spam's cost of delivery is so low (it costs practically nothing to send out all those messages, particularly if, like many spammers, you do it illegally through other people's computers) it doesn't make sense for the spammer to keep a tidy mailing list. The email you bounce back will most likely not be read, or even just fall into a sort of black hole because there's no legitimate return address.

It would cost the spammer more in time to sort through the list and delete bad addresses than it does to jus t send messages to the bad addresses in any case. So it's certainly possible to bounce spam emails back to the sender, but we'd say it was a waste of time, That's not to say Mailwasher is a bad idea; on the contrary, it effectively stops spam before it gets to your inbox, so any viruses won't get through, and it allows you to set up friends lists of people who'll always be let through. The paid-for pro version can even try to learn which of your emails are legitimate and which aren't, so if spam is a problem it's worth a try - just don't bother to bounce spam emails back.