Raymond.CC Blog

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages and there are many types of spamming methods. Spammers could send spam messages to instant messenger, blog comment, mobile phone messaging (SMS), internet forum and etc but the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam. As long as we have an email address, 99% of the time we’ll get spam emails. It is so common nowadays and it’s like part of having an email address.

It seemed like there’s nothing we can do about those email spams but to depend on the spam filter such as Spam Assassin that attempts to identify spam messages based on the content of the email’s headers and body and then auto deleting it. Today I received an email from Richard with the following message:

Hey Raymond,
You have a very nice site and I appreciate your hard work.
I wish to ask you to share some advice and tips with me. I am be pestered by a lot of spammers and I want to be able to make their emails rebound back to them somehow. Please help me out!!
Thanks,
Richard

It does seemed like a good idea to fake a bounce back message by sending a non-delivery notifications with a 554 delivery error message. After a careful consideration and research, I’d advice you not to bounce spam messages.


The truth is, 99% of the time spammers sends you messages asking you to buy stuff doesn’t use a working email address as the from email address can be easily forged. Spam messages asking you to buy stuff is a one way communication and the spammers don’t need to have an on-going email conversation with you. Only legitimate newsletters will include a working from address together with a link for you to unsubscribe. Check out a sample spam message that I got from my Gmail’s Spam folder.

gradey shinegar with the email address mrburke@adobe.com is telling me where I can download latest Microsoft, Adobe, Mac software for low prices. First of all, the sender’s name doesn’t match the email address at all. Then, Adobe staff wouldn’t be so stupid to use their own email address to spam. If I bounce the spam message with a non-delivery notification, only Adobe staff will get your message but not the spammer.

I just checked a few lottery money scam emails saying that I’ve won millions of dollars. Most of these scams requires two way communication. The from email address seemed real but it has a different reply-to email address. If this is the case, bouncing spam to the reply-to address with a non-delivery notification can possibly trick them into thinking that your email is not available and they’d remove you from the spam list.

Bouncing spam messages is time consuming and also takes up extra bandwidth. If you really want to try bouncing spam messages, here are some tools that you can use to do that.

1. MailWasher

MailWasher allows you to bounce unwanted mail right back to the spammer who sent it to you. This means that a fake, address not found message is sent back to the address the unwanted email originated from. Because the spammer thinks your address is not a valid email address, the bounce function in MailWasher reduces the possibility of receiving more unwanted email from this address. Bouncing is particularly effective for newsletters and companies that take no notice of your unsubscribe requests.

Before you can bounce email, you must have selected the Enable bouncing of messages from your account option, when you added or imported the account to MailWasher. Once you’ve enabled bouncing of messages, simple right click on the email message that you want to bounce, and select “Mark for for Bouncing”. Then you can either press F6 or the Process Mail icon to start bouncing process.

[ Download MailWasher ]

2. BounceBully

Bounce spam messages back to the spammers who sent them. Make them think your email address is invalid. BounceBully sends a spammer a message that’s the equivalent of “Return to Sender. Address Unknown.” Spammers who receive these bounced messages may be encouraged to remove you from their spam lists because they think your email address is not active.

To bounce a message using BounceBully, you just need to drag the spam email from your email client to the BounceBully drop area. The spammer’s email message will be automatically pasted to to Bounce Bully. Just hit the Bounce button to bounce. The Punish feature in BounceBully is not useful because it only loads the web pages in a spam email message a certain number of times to potentially increasing a spammers cost of sending spam.

[ Download BounceBully ]

3. Spam Bully

If you’re looking for a fully automated spam bouncing, reporting and punishing, Spam Bully (shareware) can do all that at the price of $29.95 for a year license. It can automate in getting back at spammers by increasing their costs by Punishing, returning their spam by Bouncing, and reporting them to the servers they came from and the FTC. Other than that, it can also auto-delete spam messages.

[ Download Spam Bully ]