On Thu, 16 Jul 1998, Martin McCormick wrote:

>         I have to agree with the person who said this is a bad idea.
> As much as I hate spammers and would love to see dogs and vultures
> fighting over their bleaching bones, bouncing the spam to any address
> you see in the message just hurts innocent bystanders.  You have to be

  I hope that I have made myself clear enough in my previous message,
about the necessity to bounce the spam not to the sender, but to the
postmasters of the 1st two domains that appear in the Received: list (as
you look them up from bottom to top), and to the reply address of the
spammer. This has a double effect:

1. It announces the postmasters in the 1st and 2nd used sites about their
sites being misused for spam. They can start doing something about it
right away if they have the full header of the spam message.

2. It arrives at the spammer who sees that two potential postmasters may
react immediately to his using them, and may have set up traps or filters
for him already. He will think twice about sending the spam in the same
way again.

  I admit that this generates some extra mail volume, BUT it is worth
while imho.

  Note that since I administer my own Linux box, I can and have set up
filters to dump unwanted messages like this and even bounce them in the
way described automatically. I never got more than one copy of spam of one
kind, so either it works perfectly, or spam programs suddenly got much
better than I know them to be (I took a few apart looking for clues on
spoofing methods so as to set up filters properly) ;)

  One last note: Ignore any bounces from the 3 messages that you sent out
like this, there is no point in setting up a mail loop. If doing this
automatically, be careful to sign the outgoing message somehow so as not
to bounce signed messages again.

Peter