[Resolved]"More Than One Message CAN'T Be Marked For Bounce"

[TrustFire]

Though multiple messages are selected, it's possible to mark only one message for bounce at a time.

[stan_qaz]

That is intentional, the bounce feature in MW v6 was abused to the point that MW became widely hated in the anti-spam (the stop it from being sent types) community but loved by the spammers it was helping out. The current setup is intended to help that situation a bit but it doesn't go nearly far enough as it still has no way to prevent a user from abusing innocent third parties with their bounces.

There are many posts on what is wrong with bouncing messages that you have not verified that the bounce will go back to the spammer if you care to read them.

[TrustFire]

There are many posts on what is wrong with bouncing messages that you have not verified that the bounce will go back to the spammer if you care to read them.

Well FYI, I've read all the posts about the evils of bouncing, my dear friend and agree but . . . . . . . . . only up to a certain point - like to emphasize here that a bounce is self-defeating only when employed against Pro Spammers. However, it's true potential lies in its capability to repel pests (the general Noobs) who use bonafide email IDs.

So . . . . . . . . . . . . I don't think it's intentional, at all (in which case the developers would've chosen rather to omit the bounce feature completely.)
Just in case, it's intentional as you mention, then it's back to the retarded method of selecting one message at a time to mark the same for bounce.

[stan_qaz]

The developers are in two camps on this one, the technical folks were willing to see the bounce go away while the marketing types wanted to keep it. We got a compromise that leaves nobody happy and the majority of folks still bouncing messages that help the spammer.

Still the issue is being worked on from another direction outside of Firetrust's control that may in time make the bounce feature a moot point. Anti-spam communities like Spamcop.net are now allowing the reporting of bounces as abuse and will add a server that sends too many of them to the blocklist. Spammers are also using spamtrap addresses at the return address on spam to cause bouncers grief by generating even more blocklist listings. Server admins hate having their servers on blocklists since they then have a hard time delivering outgoing mail. The server admins are in turn adding rules to their outgoing server to prevent users from forging reserved addresses and thus rejecting the forged bounces. They are also blocking port 25 access to keep you from sending the forged bounce (and other stuff like viruses) directly to an outside server. Other ISPs are just sending the user a nice e-mail quoting the ISPs abuse and/or header forgery policy and telling them that if they get another complaint about forged bounces the user's account will be closed. I use several ISPs and have one in each camp, no bouncing for me from either account.

The forgery of bounce messages by users and the clueless ISPs that generate delayed bounce messages rather than using SMTP Reject to deal with spam has gone down over the last couple years which is a good thing. It has been a while since I opened my e-mail to 8,000 clueless bounces which is another good thing but I do have my MW bounce filters up and running and my spamcop.net account set up to auto-process any I get. Oh, and just because I hate bounces I have a couple web pages of e-mail addresses out there populated with the addresses of folks that bounce to me so spammers can collect them and send them more spam.

[rusticdog]

Actually having multiple messages selected and using the B hotkey should mark all for bounce. Not something we rampantly publicise for reasons above, but it's there.


If that's not working, it's possible one of the accounts involved has incorrect/missing SMTP setup, as MailWasher won't bounce emails on accounts that don't have any SMTP data.

[TrustFire]

Actually having multiple messages selected and using the B hotkey should mark all for bounce. Not something we rampantly publicise for reasons above, but it's there.

Ah rusticdog, now that's what I was looking for - it works for me (I appreciate it - saves me precious time.)



@ stan_qaz

. . . . . . seems you were right about this being intentional (appreciate your second post, too - thanks.)

[stan_qaz]

It is a pesky problem but the firetrust folks are paying attention to it and I'm hoping it gets better in MW. My favorite fix would be for them to implement SPF and refuse to bounce to any address that failed that check. It wouldn't be perfect but it would stop me from getting any MW bounces since I spent the 15 minutes needed to set up SPF for my domain.

Adding more stuff like DomainKeys would be good too to protect folks on larger systems that use that.