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Hi !
First of all, thank you for your kind words, I really do appreciate them ! :-)
The "Bounce" function can be, as we see in the article, a great help, by sending to your correspondents a message that states that their mail couldn't be delivered.
However, two things can make the "Bounce" function less or not effective :
1. The SPAMmer doesn't check for bounced messages. In that case, bouncing them won't help you and will just increase bandwidth consumption on your network.
2. In some instances of specially crafted SPAM messages, your mail provider may be tempted to "fill in" your address in the bounced message or add other information that will, in fact, reveal your address to a SPAMmer and/or confirm that you received the SPAM. This of course supposes that the SPAMmer or the computers he uses take the time to read all bounces, which may or may not be the case.
All in all, "Bounce" is an extremely powerful feature. It should however not be used without carefully weighting the adverse effects it can have -- it is up to you to see if the mail you received will fall into one of the two categories we just saw.
Let me know if this helps !
F.J.
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AFAIK, hardly any spammers (if any) check for invalid email addresses in this way, by keeping track of bounces. Hardly practical/worth their time and resources. The sender/reply-to address in today's spam is either bogus... or indeed a valid one - belonging to a randomly selected individual from spammer's email list. (This is called joe-jobbing and happens to me regularly.)
I see a point in auto-bouncing all email that's classified as spam and auto-deleted at the same time. This precaution is, however, quite costly in bandwith. In my experience, when spam filtering is well set up, the only possible candidates for false positives are automated messages and mailing lists. Both won't either care about your bounce at all - or will proceed with taking the recipient off their list.
Best,
Ben
Photojournalist and Wedding Photographer, London, UK