Busy — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 21:53:27 +0000

also many spammers fake the headers, so your bounceback may be to some innocent person (could even be yourself)
I have mine set up with set names, and anything else gets sent to black_hole but all my emails must come via a form, otherwise it's spammed or guessed and is probably junk anyways. bouncing also can add to you bandwidth.

Suzanne — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 16:25:36 +0000

One big thing is that the :blackhole: will seriously reduce your unwanted email! But the bad thing is, if someone makes an error in the email name that's real, you won't get it.

The :fail: option alerts them that there is a problem, for bonafide senders.

mairving — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 16:08:56 +0000

fifeclub wrote: (Sorry if this is the wrong forum category)
Will an automated bounceback tell spammers that the email is invalid and possibly lead towards them to remove the errant address from their list? Or may this cause some spammers to increase spam to my domain, now that they know that the domain is valid?

Spammers don't put a lot of time into removing invalid email addresses, so no sending them a bounceback message will not get them to remove you from the list in most cases. I don't think that it will increase or decrease spam knowing that the domain is valid. It seems that most spammers use lists gleaned from websites and whois searches rather than randomly guessing valid domains.