Asked By A Reader...

The following question was asked by a reader of this blog, and I informed the reader that as it was a good question and that the answer is quite involved, that I'd cover it later as a separate blog entry, so here we go.

Here's the question:

"Since you are discussing Spam I will ask a question that I've had for some time. Why can't email vendors (google, AOL, MSN, etc.) setup on one of their gateways to return emails as undeliverable, if their customer puts the mail in a Spam folder. Won't that result in the Spammer removing the email from their distribution list after a few undeliverable messages?"

And here's the answer:

Nice idea, if the vast majority of spammers:

• Didn't fake [spoof] the address that the e-mail appears to be from, so the real spammer rarely sees any bounces as all bounced mail ends up going to the e-mail address that the spammers stole, this type of attack is known as a 'Joe Job'. In some cases this is intentional to try and discredit a company or individual.


• Didn't totally ignore unsubscribe requests, in fact this only makes the e-mail address you try and unsubscribe more valuable to the spammers as it means it is active. You will get more, not less spam if you insist on using them.


• Weren't criminals using botnets to send 90 percent of their 'crud' and as these criminals are using computers that they have infected with malware to allow them to send their 'crud' through, they have little to fear from their own ISPs.


• So, the bottom line is, nice idea, but it is completely unworkable using the current SMTP standards. SMTP2 anyone?

A quick update on my latest anti-spam experiment:

Since my last posting I've received just 12 spam/malware e-mails which managed to sidestep the new defences. To put this in context , before I put these new techniques in place I usually received around 1,000 e-mails a day, of those about 90 percent was spam, so instead of around 900 spam e-mails a day, I'm now getting about 6!

So, does anyone have any other questions they would like me to try and answer, or have anything to say about this one?

* I'll cover this in detail in another posting.