bouncing mail - not working
- annette_nz
- Rattled Rabbit
Post
bouncing mail - not working
Im a newbie and its doing my head in already my mails arent bouncing and cant seem to work out why not need some help/advise please!!
-
stan_qaz
- Omniscient Kiwi
- Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Post
Re: bouncing mail - not working
Most likely answer is that your ISP doesn't let you help the spammers out by forging bounce messages. That is a good thing as it keeps you from getting into trouble for forging mail headers and abusing innocent people.
This has a lot more on bouncing but the simple answer is don't bounce it will cause you much grief.
http://wiki.castlecops.com/What_is_Wron ... ncing_Spam
This has a lot more on bouncing but the simple answer is don't bounce it will cause you much grief.
http://wiki.castlecops.com/What_is_Wron ... ncing_Spam
- annette_nz
- Rattled Rabbit
Post
Re: bouncing mail - not working
If I wish to bounce unwanted mail back to where it came from I'm quite within my rights to do so - once its working!
- Ikeb
- Microsoft MVP with a slice of PITA
- Contact:
- Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Post
Re: bouncing mail - not working
I can understand your frustration however the simple fact of the matter is that spammers forge the replyto: and from: email addresses at will so you end up perpetuating the spam to some innocent joe. Spammers have been known to get revenge by leaving someone's email address as the reply to address for several spam runs thus resulting in such "joe jobbed" folks having thousands of bounces in their inboxes. Your ignorance of this practice is quite common thus it would be wise if you read the article Stan referenced.
-
stan_qaz
- Omniscient Kiwi
- Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Post
Re: bouncing mail - not working
Ike has hit the issue exactly, Mailwasher does not know where the spam came from and makes no attempt to figure it out.
Instead MailWasher just sends a copy of the e-mail and a fake bounce message with forged headers to the person the spammer wants to harass.
So while I agree that you have a right to bounce mail back to the sender that is not what you are doing in 90% or more of the incoming spam messages you get.
What MailWasher is actually doing (not what the ad copy claims at all) is helping spammers mess with folks like me that spend a lot of time trying to get spammer's accounts closed and their mail servers blocked from sending spam. A couple spammers have me on their list of folks to mess with and once every few days they will "borrow" my e-mail address and forge it onto their spam messages. That results in several thousand folks like you (that have been sold a bill of goods on bouncing) sending me fake bounce messages about an e-mail I have never seen before.
What this then comes down to is that by bouncing a spam from a spammer to me (or another innocent person) you are helping the spammer. In addition to helping the spammer you are in violation of at least two of the rules of your ISP, you have forged the header of an e-mail to disguise the real sender (you) and you have participated in the harassment of an innocent bystander (me or the other person you bounce to) both of which can result in your account being closed. I report every bounce I get and ask that the user be warned and then if they don't stop abusing others that their account be closed.
Now if you want to do something about spam you can use the FirstAlert system built into mailwasher to help other users detect and delete spam or better use the www.spamcop.net tool to submit your spam and generate reports to the folks hosting the spammers accounts and add their servers to the blocking list so folks will know that they are spewing spam and should be ignored.
Nobody is blaming you for this sad state of affairs, when I got started many years back I read about bouncing in mailwasher and thought it sounded wonderful. I got a nice e-mail from my ISP stating pretty much the above points and telling me if they got any more reports of me forging mail or disrupting other's mailboxes I'd be tossed.
Please reconsider, quit helping the spammer, harassing others and likely causing yourself trouble.
Instead MailWasher just sends a copy of the e-mail and a fake bounce message with forged headers to the person the spammer wants to harass.
So while I agree that you have a right to bounce mail back to the sender that is not what you are doing in 90% or more of the incoming spam messages you get.
What MailWasher is actually doing (not what the ad copy claims at all) is helping spammers mess with folks like me that spend a lot of time trying to get spammer's accounts closed and their mail servers blocked from sending spam. A couple spammers have me on their list of folks to mess with and once every few days they will "borrow" my e-mail address and forge it onto their spam messages. That results in several thousand folks like you (that have been sold a bill of goods on bouncing) sending me fake bounce messages about an e-mail I have never seen before.
What this then comes down to is that by bouncing a spam from a spammer to me (or another innocent person) you are helping the spammer. In addition to helping the spammer you are in violation of at least two of the rules of your ISP, you have forged the header of an e-mail to disguise the real sender (you) and you have participated in the harassment of an innocent bystander (me or the other person you bounce to) both of which can result in your account being closed. I report every bounce I get and ask that the user be warned and then if they don't stop abusing others that their account be closed.
Now if you want to do something about spam you can use the FirstAlert system built into mailwasher to help other users detect and delete spam or better use the www.spamcop.net tool to submit your spam and generate reports to the folks hosting the spammers accounts and add their servers to the blocking list so folks will know that they are spewing spam and should be ignored.
Nobody is blaming you for this sad state of affairs, when I got started many years back I read about bouncing in mailwasher and thought it sounded wonderful. I got a nice e-mail from my ISP stating pretty much the above points and telling me if they got any more reports of me forging mail or disrupting other's mailboxes I'd be tossed.
Please reconsider, quit helping the spammer, harassing others and likely causing yourself trouble.
-
AlphaCentauri
- Guardian Gecko
- Contact:
Post
Re: bouncing mail - not working
I'll back up Stan and Ikeb. Almost no spammers use their real return address in the "from." What they are doing is illegal, and they use fake information to identify themselves at every step of the way.
And almost none bother to remove bad addresses from their email lists, because they aren't mailing from their own accounts. Have you noticed all this spam trying to get you to download malware (computer viruses, etc.)? That is to recruit your computer as a "zombie," so they can use it to mail their spam. So it's of no concern to them that they are using up bandwidth to mail to inactive email addresses, since they're using someone else's bandwidth in the first place.
Do you hate spam in your inbox? How would you like to get 1,900 spams in a two hour period? That happened to me when a spammer figured out I was reporting him and started using my email address in the "from" of his spam runs on a regular basis. (Of course, it didn't occur to that doofus that since I was getting all those bounces, I was getting copies of the original spams. So I knew that he was not only mailing highly illegal spams with links to hacked sites that were infecting people with malware, but was also mailing for replica sites that provide cookies identifying exactly which spammer should get credit for your business. So I've got a boatload of evidence against him when he gets caught.)
In the unlikely event that a spammer would like to clean his list (a couple do), if you forward the spam to spamcop.net, they will get the message -- without the other slimeball spammers putting you on their "people who open emails" lists and selling your email address to other spammers for top dollar. That being said, the current bunch of spams that provide unsubscribe links with the address "635 Massachusetts Ave" or "(c) 2008" are from criminals trying to identify antispammers, not from semi-legit spammers cleaning their lists -- just delete those spams without sending them anywhere, or you'll likely find your email address in the "from" field of a spam run, too.
And almost none bother to remove bad addresses from their email lists, because they aren't mailing from their own accounts. Have you noticed all this spam trying to get you to download malware (computer viruses, etc.)? That is to recruit your computer as a "zombie," so they can use it to mail their spam. So it's of no concern to them that they are using up bandwidth to mail to inactive email addresses, since they're using someone else's bandwidth in the first place.
Do you hate spam in your inbox? How would you like to get 1,900 spams in a two hour period? That happened to me when a spammer figured out I was reporting him and started using my email address in the "from" of his spam runs on a regular basis. (Of course, it didn't occur to that doofus that since I was getting all those bounces, I was getting copies of the original spams. So I knew that he was not only mailing highly illegal spams with links to hacked sites that were infecting people with malware, but was also mailing for replica sites that provide cookies identifying exactly which spammer should get credit for your business. So I've got a boatload of evidence against him when he gets caught.)
In the unlikely event that a spammer would like to clean his list (a couple do), if you forward the spam to spamcop.net, they will get the message -- without the other slimeball spammers putting you on their "people who open emails" lists and selling your email address to other spammers for top dollar. That being said, the current bunch of spams that provide unsubscribe links with the address "635 Massachusetts Ave" or "(c) 2008" are from criminals trying to identify antispammers, not from semi-legit spammers cleaning their lists -- just delete those spams without sending them anywhere, or you'll likely find your email address in the "from" field of a spam run, too.