Bouncebacks: The Hidden Cost of Spam

[ronjor]

-{ Quote: "A new report details how junk e-mail that bounces back to uninvolved third parties can cause disruptions and outages.

A nasty side effect of spam and e-mailed viruses is costing companies an estimated $5 billion per year in IT resources, according to security services company IronPort.

The culprit: Bounced e-mail message warnings sent from servers advising an e-mail sender that the e-mail they tried to send was undeliverable." }-
Story (http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3601716)

[Paranoid2000]

This creates a nasty dilemma for email administrators - bouncebacks can be disabled but then that means legitimate errors (e.g. someone spelling an email address incorrectly) then go unreported.

This problem also affects challenge-response systems (which send their challenges to innocent third parties), mailing lists (with subscription notices) and any auto-responders (vacation messages, receipt acknowledgements, etc).

The solution is to check email headers to identify the real source of the message and to discard any where it does not match the domain of the From: field. Another option would be to junk any incoming messages that are identified as spam.

The optimum solution though is to inflict severe physical damage on spammers. This tactic is wasting millions of man-hours globally for users, administrators and support staff and in terms of damage to society, easily places spammers at the top of the criminal league.