More Spam

Richard Giles comments on SpamSaver, one of the worst ideas I’ve heard of in a long time. Essentially SpamSaver aims to feed a massive number of useless email addresses into the spammer’s database making it all but useless and swamping them with bounced mail. Sadly, the flaw lies in the last part – the spammers don’t see the bounced mail – the poor sap who’s email address they forged does. PLEASE don’t contribute to more of this “bounce-spam”, it’s already reached the point where I receive more bounce messages than I do actual spam. Mostly that’s from virus bounce messages, but an increasing amount is from spam bounce messages too and things like SpamSaver will only make that worse. So please don’t use SpamSaver and if you’re a sysadmin configure your servers to never send automatic emails for any reason. I don’t care if the email address doesn’t exist, I don’t care if the message had a virus and I really don’t care if the person is on vacation. Unless you can be 100% sure that the From: address is real (which you can’t) don’t send mail to it.