To bounce or not to bounce; that is the question
Sean at WiredAtom says that he has reduced his daily spam quota from 30 to 40 emails a day to just 10.
He’s done this by using Mail.app’s “Bounce” feature.
Apple Mail allows you to bounce (“Bounce” in the Message menu; Shift-Command-B) a message you don’t want back to the sender, who gets a delivery failure message including the following:
<tim@hawkwings.net>
The sender then removes you from their mailing list and the unwanted messages stop. That’s the theory. And Sean says that it has worked for him.
But not everyone is convinced. Some people think that bouncing is a bad idea. SpamLinks has a whole page on the Evils of Bouncing. There are three problems at least:
- Spammers often use false reply-to address, which means that your bounce will be bounced back to you.
- Or they will use someone else’s real address, so that a real user gets a “bounce” message for a spam email they never sent. Some people take this badly.
- The whole theory relies on the assumption that spammers care enough about the efficiency of their operation to remove dud email addresses. Maybe they don’t.
To bounce or not to bounce? Apple’s own tech note on bouncing draws a distinction between bouncing messages from commercial mass mailings (useful) and bouncing spam (not so useful). Maybe it’s not a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
One thing’s for sure. As long as one in five U.S. residents buy products from spam advertisers, spam will continue to be a problem.
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October 9th, 2005 at 10:26 am
Since I am, or at least used to be, pretty well-known in the anti-spam community, I have had my email address used for spam runs many times. People using “bounce” or replying with “remove” amounts to no less than a DOS attack, one that I have experienced all too many times. Please, and I’m really, really serious here, NEVER, EVER do this with spam. The person you’re bouncing that mail to is probably not the spammer, and in fact is probably a spam-fighter that the spammer is annoyed at and wants to attack in exactly this way.
Spam levels ebb and flow, so any change seen that seems to result from doing this is almost certainly a coincidence. If I had a nickel for every time I thought some change I made caused the subsequent reduction in spam, only to see it rise back to my usual 1000 or so per day, I’d be wealthy.
The distinction between “spam” and “mass mailings” is a good one, though. A legit mass-mailing with a real reply address is a different thing entirely.
October 9th, 2005 at 9:24 pm
20% actually buy stuff from spammers…?!? Unbelievable…!! I often wondered why the spam rates wouldn’t decrease over years, thinking that more and more people are becoming aware of the problems spam causes…but I’d never have thought that there would be so many people actually reading them and even ordering those products…!?!
November 20th, 2005 at 6:05 am
Yup. Agreed. I should really update that blog entry you referred to.
What happens is that while some emails actually successfully get bounced back and my address removed from their spam bot, more and more are bounced back to me as “undeliverable”… They are just as bad as spams. But at least I can set up rules in Apple Mail to deal with them.
My 2 cents.
January 28th, 2006 at 8:35 am
[...] Using the “Bounce” feature on spam is a bad idea. [...]
November 20th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
[...] Alexander Obenauer tells one of those seductive stories which has come up once or twice before and which you wish could be true for everyone. [...]
December 20th, 2006 at 5:33 am
what’s the point of Apple including a bounce feature in mail.app if everyone says its a bad idea, way to go apple another blunder ?
December 20th, 2006 at 6:48 am
Apple doesn’t say that it is always a bad idea. Its technote tries to draw distinctions between emails that ought to be bounced, and emails that should just be deleted.