[X-Newbies] Dealing with Spam

[Randy B.Singer]

Tony Johansen said:

>Is there such a thing as software or a script that can return suspicious
>e-mails to their point of origin that would make them look like they were
>undelivered?


Yes.  Mail.app has a "fake bounce" feature, as does:

Mail Siphon II
http://maliasoft.appeule.com/us/mailsiphon.html

The common wisdom is that using a fake bounce message shouldn't help, 
because spammers all use forged e-mail addresses.  

However, someone told me that spammers actually make a lot of money by 
constantly keeping their mailing lists current and reselling them.  
Spammers monitor bounced messages and update their mailing lists.  So 
sending fake bounces theoretically should work.  The problem is finding 
the correct address to send the fake bounce to. (The address in the 
"from" line of most spam is indeed usually bogus.) I was told that you 
can find the "return path" from which the e-mail was sent in the full 
header in the spam message and use that to successfully send a fake 
bounce message to. (You have to turn on "show full headers" in your 
e-mail program to see the full header.)

So, one time when I was fed up with the amount of spam that I was 
receiving, I tried Mail Siphon.  It was a lot of work.  For two weeks I 
sent a fake bounce in return for every spam e-mail message I received.  
Some spam messages had two or three return paths in their header, so I 
sent a fake bounce to all of them.  I must have sent many hundreds of 
fake bounces.

My first sign that I was actually being successful was that none of the 
fake bounce messages that I was sending out were bouncing back to me.  By 
the end of two weeks I was receiving an impressively dimished amount of 
spam.  Only three or four spam messages a day.  (Normally I get many 
times that.)  This only lasted for a couple of weeks, however, before the 
amount of spam that I received started to increase again.  My address had 
probably been harvested again from elsewhere and was once again being 
passed around among spammers.

In the end, I don't think that it is worth it to go through all of the 
trouble to send out fake bounce messages.  Now, instead, I've just 
created a bunch of rules in my e-mail program and all of the spam the I 
receive is filtered automatically into a folder in my e-mail program 
called "suspected spam".  I check that folder once a day to see if there 
is any legitimate e-mail in it to rescue, and then I trash the remaining 
contents.  This is quite a bit easier a way to deal with spam.




Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html