

Tell HN: Fake email bounce to fight spam idea - sbazerque

I guess spammers must try to keep their email lists clean of wrong addresses, since bounces hurt their sending score in spam filters. What would happen if every time I flag an email as spam in my gmail, it would automatically send a bounce to the sender? I guess sometimes the sender is spoofed, so the bounce wouldn't make sense, but with some pseudo-spammy websites I think that's not the case.<p>What do you think?
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gregschlom
Depends of what you call "spam"

If you mean real spam, like those trying to sell you pills or scamming /
phishing information out of you, bouncing the email won't have any effect at
all. The messages are usually sent from botnets (ie: networks of hundreds of
infected computers controlled by the spammer), the reply addresses are faked,
etc...

If, on the other hand, you mean regular websites that have acquired a database
of harvested email adresses and are spamming you with their newsletter, then
either they care for the quality of the base and they'll usually provide you
with an unsubscribe link, or they don't and there's no point in bouncing back
the mail. It will just be ignored. Best thing to do against them still is
legal action, since they usually cannot / will not hide their real identity,
like professional spammers do.

Conclusion: automatic spam classification is still the way to go, and I must
say that gmail is good enough at it that I'm rarely bothered by spam in my
inbox.

~~~
sbazerque
Yeah, you're probably right (esp. the fake origin argument). But:

\- Algorithmic filtering is an arms race, I still get SPAM in gmail almost
every day (albeit just one or two).

\- Legal action is out of reach for most people (probably everybody who is
outside of the US/EU).

\- Just flaggin 'em as spam has lost the "HA - there you go: I just FLAGGED
YOU AS SPAM!!!" feeling over the years, now it is more like "Duh hum another
spammy email. Flagged it again".

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mooism2
_What would happen if every time I flag an email as spam in my gmail, it would
automatically send a bounce to the sender?_

Gmail would get blocked as a spammer, because...

 _sometimes the sender is spoofed_

...so they would be sending spam to the spoofed sender, who doesn't want to
read the spam either.

~~~
sbazerque
Allah akbar!

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pclark
Mail.app does the "spoof bounce" thing. Don't think it works.

