How effective is bouncing spam?

I have been using Mailwasher a few days and have the spam set to bounce. But I have now noticed that I have more spam than ever before. Any suggestions? Is bouncing spam really effective? I have settings enabled where spam is bounced and blacklisted. Also, I have my server set to not tag spam so it is just caught in MailWasher.

 

I wouldn't bother with bouncing spam as it serves to show your email address is active.

 

I learned a long time ago not to bounce spam, it just make ripples in the water and tells them someone is there.

 

Maybe an app that can show and delete any spam at the servers end could be a better solution.

Using Palmail here which hasn't been developed in a while but is a standalone and works fine on my XP/Vista installs.

 

Bouncing spam not only won't help, it makes you a spammer too.

Spammers use false email addresses. The unfortunate ones legitimately using the faked addresses unfortunately are being subjected to the back-scatter, and are experiencing what's called a joe job. Until the back-scatter calms down once the spammer stops using the faked address, it become basically useless to the legitimate user.

Why Mailwasher continues to include that useless and spam creating feature, I don't know.

 

Agree! The only place spam should go is the trash.

 

"the email system allows a spammer to change the Return-path: address to any address desired -- and at least 90% of the time that's exactly what happens. So where does the bounce go?"
In your case it looks like you are getting your own bounced spam back.

 

Mailwasher, the program mentioned by acr1965, allows one to do just that. It just happens to have the option to bounce as well. My advice would be not to use that option, and use the other features of the program.

As has been said previously, quite why they have bounce as an option I don't know.

There are other POP3 email checkers that scan mail servers and let you see what's on there before downloading. POPTray is another example of this genre.

 

Isn't the point of a bounced email to say the address is inactive? Do mail servers no longer bounce undeliverable mail the same way Mailwasher does?

 

I think bouncing spam back is of no use. The return email address is probably a fake one. Best thing to do is to establish another email address and redirect any expected correspondence to the new one. Let the old one just be a collector of junk mail. If you really need to use the old account, I would try to have some kind of change done on the mail server end and not on my own PC.