On Thursday, August 21, 2003, 2:59:15 PM, Cyberspace Publishing commented: CP> Abigail, I would tend to agree with you except for one fact that CP> I cannot ignore - since I changed the "From:" address for the CP> bouncing, my spam has *noticeably* decreased!
I do REAL bouncing at the server level, and I don't particularly see decreases as a result of bounces. That is, my logs are still showing spam email to addresses that have been disabled and returning "user unknown" for years. So I think your experience is anecdotal -- it may be true for you, but that doesn't mean it works for others. CP> I flag everyone I want to receive email from as "Friend" - including CP> everyone in lists I belong to. Everyone else gets bounced - period. :) You are looking at this issue from the standpoint of being an email recipient. I am looking at it from the standpoint of running an SMTP server for a company doing business internationally and seeing what goes through. Obviously, in my position, your friend-only regimen doesn't work. Bottom line, most of our paying clients start out as strangers; a lot of them send email to us from hotmail or yahoo accounts, and many even have have weird names with numbers after them. AOL is also a big source of paying customers for us. The last thing we want to do is "blacklist" or "bounce" a potential customer. And since we are an international business, we DO get REAL email from Brazil, Russia, China, etc.. I am also using Mailwasher (the free version) to check questionable mail coming through our server as well as my personal email. That is, my spam filtering software sends email that is possible spam to a POP box called Spam - I check Spam with Mailwasher - and I rescue any false positives by downloading them to my email program and then redirecting them to the appropriate user. CP> If you haven't looked at MailWasher Pro, and are still using the free CP> version, you might want to try the 30 day trial. No, it really doesn't sound like it offers anything I need. You certainly haven't mentioned anything that sounds enticing, so I'm inclined to stick with what I've got. CP> MailWasher Pro puts the 'preview' pane directly CP> below the header list pane, so it's a simple matter to quickly check CP> an email and determine if it is spam or not. If I want to READ the email, my email program does that, plus has sophisticated filtering abilities that far outclass Mailwasher. The reason I use Mailwasher is that I like the neat, uncluttered, spreadsheet-like layout. The pictures of the PRO interface basically don't look too encouraging to me. CP> If it is - BOUNCED! No, what happens is that you send it back to Mailwasher, and they generate a message from their servers that might be technically deemed a refusal, not a bounce. Some spammers might remove names upon receiving that message, but they aren't fooled -- I'm sure they can easily recognize a Mailwasher bounce for what it is. Again, as someone who deals with server administration, I have no fondness whatsoever for excess bounce messages being generated. I favor simply reporting the spammers for abuse to appropriate places, and deleting the spam. If they have spammed you they've spammed 10,000 other people, and rather than 10,000 bounce messages, it makes more sense to pull the plug on wherever they are mailing from. -Abigail ____ � The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM � ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
