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.

He says,

I was playing with the customize toolbar feature in Mail.app when I saw a button labelled “Bounce”. After using the bounce feature on the tens of spam I get daily for 3 days, my inbox is spam free. Incredible.

An email given the bounce treatment in Mail.app gets returned to the sender as if it were undeliverable. And, so the theory goes, sees your email address removed from the spammer’s database.

Rather than repeat what I suggested last time, Ray (in the comments to Alexander’s post) puts the other side:

I thought about this technique about five years ago. Here are my conclusions: Not all spammers remove you from their list if they receive a bounce message. Most spam uses a bogus From address, so your bounce will most likely end up in someone else’s inbox.

I like a good silver bullet. This is far from it.

So, 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.

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Adrian Sutton describes how he has set up SpamAssassin and Mail’s inbuilt Junk Filter to work together for extra spam-catching cleverness.

Having set up both SpamAssassin and Mail to dump their spam in Mail.app’s Junk folder, he runs SpamAssassin’s sa-learn script in a cron job so that it learns from what Mail’s Junk filter catches as well.

Running sa-learn –ham on Mail’s Inbox after returns false positives with Mail’s “Not Junk” button, helps SpamAssassin learn what’s not spam.

As a result, he has “a partially self-training system with a user-friendly interface”.

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Fastmail , my main email server provider, has recently introduced greylisting (Wikipedia ) in an attempt to reduce the amount of spam getting into inboxes.

Greylisting works by initially rejecting email from an unknown mail server. The theory goes that legitimate emails will be resent and are then accepted the second time, whilst spammers won’t bother resending, so their emails are, in effect, blocked.

It’s a noble idea, and in a perfect world would work perfectly.

Over the weekend, the company acknowledged defeat in its attempts to tweak the feature a little. The story is worth retelling. It shows not only a well-intentioned company frustrated by practical realities outside its control but also how sneaky spammers are:

Recently we’ve observed that some spam zombie machines are smarter than others, and do SMTP retrying which means that they bypass greylisting. These machines have been reponsible for a large number of “stock scam” spams that include random text and an attached gif. Between Oct 17 to Oct 20 we were trying out a new greylisting policy that involved taking feedback from the spam scoring system, and re-greylisting systems with an increased delay if they had delivered emails that had been detected as spam by the scoring system. Our testing suggested that this quickly and effectively blocked the zombie machines.

Unfortunately it also blocked a small number of poorly configured real email servers that were being used for forwarding because they would also forward all spam emails, and thus be judged as the source of the spam. This caused some emails to be delayed for many hours or in some cases over a day. We’ve now removed this policy totally. While the concept seems a good idea, unfortunately the small number of incorrectly configured hosts out there mean that this just causes too much of a problem for them.

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Postini, the spam-catching and security-monitoring company, has released its report on the health of email for September 2006.

The company claims that spam now accounts for four out of every five emails that passed through the company’s scanners, an increase of 1.6% over August.

It also reports that,

at any given time, 50,000 unique computers on the Internet that were simultaneously exhibiting malicious behavior such as attempting to propagate spam, viruses, phishing and other attacks against email communications.

Virus-laden emails made up 0.44% of all emails that the company scanned.

Either I am particularly blessed or these reports are a bit of a beat-up.

Even when you read them cautiously (it only measures the email that Postini sees — c. 9 billion emails, and the company has a vested interest in talking the problem up), it seems so out of whack with the amount of spam than passes through my accounts.

I reckon that only 30-40% of my emails are spam. Perhaps my email service catches the rest, perhaps Australians are not desirable targets, perhaps things are worse in the corporate email world, perhaps personal experience is not the most statistically sound starting point.

Of course, that’s 30-40% too much but it’s not prophet of doom material.

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Over the past few months, a number of people have noticed a sharp increase in spam in their .Mac accounts and have wondered why a premium service like .Mac doesn’t include server-side spam filtering.

Scott Murray has decided to do something about it. He has written an AppleScript that automates the reporting of spam to spam@mac.com and spam@uce.gov, the US Federal Trade Commission’s official spam-report mailbox.

Using this script, he hopes, will “let the .Mac team know about all this spam, so they can crank up the juice on their filters.”

Instructions for installing and using the script can be found on Scott’s web page .

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1. Automatically mark emails needing a reply: A poster on macOSXHints describes how to set up a rule that will automatically mark incoming emails requesting a reply. Easily adaptable to other uses.
2. Catch image spam: A new brand of image-based spam can outfox Mail.app’s junk filter. Luckily, an easy-to-construct rule will stop it in its tracks again.
3. Remotely schedule torrent downloads: Matt Comi shows you how to construct a rule that will automatically strip out a torrent that you email to yourself and pass it to Azureus to begin the download. Bittorrenting from work without guilt or fear!
4. Control your home Mac remotely: Attached to a mail.app rule, this applescript can automate a select number of tasks when prompted by emails with the right keywords. A couple of apps make this even easier to set up.
5. AppleScripted Auto-replies: Michelle Steiner has written an applescript that will generate auto-replies when attached to a Mail.app rule. Macresponder does the same thing with more options but costs money.

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