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T'ai-chi
Authored by: JayBee on Feb 23, '02 11:00:59AM
My old T'ai-chi instructor used to say "If it's 99% right, it's 100% wrong"

Never mind all the minor ethical problems here (we could argue all night what "legal address" and "undeliverable" means). If you have someone savvy enough to spot this fake (and that probably means most of the people who would bother to weed their lists regularly), then bouncing like this is going to be just as bad as replying to a removal address.

You'd be as well yelling "Nobody in here but us chickens!" ; )

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T'ai-chi
Authored by: chyna4xena on Nov 26, '06 08:38:31PM

I doubt very much that a bounce would signal to a spammer that the address is valid. Spammers send out millions of e-mails at a time, and a large proportion, if not most, of the addresses on their lists will be (genuinely) invalid.

A lot of those genuinely invalid addresses will generate a bounce back to the spammer (or their faked reply address), so how exactly is the spammer supposed to tell which bounces come from people hitting the bounce button, and which bounces come from the servers rejecting an invalid address?

They can't.

However, most spammers don't care about bounces, they rarely get them (due to faked reply addresses), they don't do anything with them, and they don't remove the address from their list. They already send out a tonne of spam knowing that some or most will go to nowhere (invalid addresses), so why would they care about trimming down that list slightly?

I keep the bounce option solely for human senders, it sometimes gets them to stop mailing.



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