After reading a recent article in PCPro (UK) I have disabled bouncing from my default account. The article pointed out that (a) most spammers use fake email addresses and move on, so never get the bounce, and wouldn't give a monkey's if they did; (b) genuine bounces happen much faster than MWPro generated ones and (c) due to reason (a) you're just clogging the bandwidth with dross. Also for me (d) Norton Anti-Virus, which I have configured to check outgoing email too (don't want to pass on anything I might catch) was constantly giving me error messages because the return ids were fake (see (a) again). So, I've discontinued it. Bouncing used to make me feel like I was doing something against spam. Now I think it's just peeing into the wind.

I found exactly the same thing with Norton Antivirus. I also found that MWPro often gives errors when trying to bounce emails (virtually every time). This was the main reason I bought MWPro, and now I am realising it was a total waste of money.

If MWPro could actually read the complete headers to discern the originating machine, and then send a message to the domain/ISP administrator notifying them of the spam, it would be much better because the network administrator could take action to prevent spam (and they would because spam uses up valuable bandwidth). As it is, I now manually read the headers and contact administrators myself, to some success I might add.

I'd never say it was a total waste of money just because automatic bouncing doesn't always work. Its other options are indispensable and one I have it completely trained, which will only take another week or so, I'm going to set it to automatic and say goodbye to cheap mortage offers and invitations to view inter-species mating.

IMHO The sort of spam checking you're talking about would need a program as powerful as the human brain, and there's not many of those about.

BTW, if a user does decide to stick with bouncing, you can cut down enormously on MW Pro's native bounce error messages by going to "Account properties" and changing the "advanced bouncing options" to "use remote servers with local fallback".

I have MWP on my home PC but sometimes look at my e-mails at work. I used to delete spam at work but since becoming a Mailwasher user I have tended to save it so that I could bounce it at home. Even if this was a waste of time, I still managed, in the space of a couple of weeks, to build up a really good blacklist. When I became confident with wildcards I turned on auto-delete. Now only a small amount of rubbish gets through, though I did have to blacklist all of Yahoo.com, feeling, perhaps unfairly given what I've read about false addresses, that it seemed too easy for pornmeisters to send out multiple copies of the same piece of garbage from Yahoo accounts. My technique now is to bounce new spam and add it to the blacklist but not to bother bouncing already-blacklisted messages.
I'd like to repeat my request made on the wish-list thread that "auto-delete" becomes an option, albeit a "use it very much at your own risk" option for DNS blacklisted messages. I periodically check the spam log text file in the applications folder to see if I've missed anything anyway (and to get a nice, warm feeling of satisfaction at the amount of trash that never got near my screen in the first place!)
Gregor

Hadn't thought of it that way - I will wait and build-up my blacklist. Thanks for the advice!

p.s. It is still disappointing that the bounce feature isn't nearly as useful as hoped for, but I agree that this is down to inherent "unbounceibility" of most spam.

And of course if the cleaver spammer can detect it's a fake bounce, it achieves the OPPOSITE effect i.e. confirms your email address is VALID!

Also if they can detect it's a MailWasher fake bounce, they have valuable info to get round your defences!

now that would be a useful addition! That said, most mail still seems to be unbounceable.

Which brings me back to the original point - is there any point in bouncing stuff anyway? Do the people who send out spam give a damn (except when they are paying attention enough to notice fake bounces?)

Personally the option I want is the option to remove the "mark for bouncing" colmun as nothing I've read here suggests to me it's useful.

I agree. I have posted elsewhere that I would like the option to hide all the Bounce stuff (especially the column) if I turn off bouncing. I have it turned off for all my accounts now so the bounce column is a waste of space.

I used to bounce all my junk mail, but I later realized that it was not bouncing from the email address that the mail was sent to (so I was replying with my REAL email address not the alias that the junk was sent to!!) Also, I don't think the spammers care or even check for bounced addresses.

Please can we turn it off and hide the column.

Woo woo

Probably for the best. The idea of bouncing originally attracted me to MWPro though, and had I known it wasn't very useful, I think I would have gone for a different anti-spam tool which supports IMAP mail servers/was cheaper or free, or just had more features instead. By getting rid of the bouncing option, you might not attract people (gullible like me!) who think that bouncing might work. On the other hand, in the long-run it's probably better that way, or people will be disappointed to find that bouncing doesn't work (like me).

One comment though - even if bouncing does confirm your email address to a spammer, I don't think that matters as long as you have MWPro set to filter your spam correctly (once it's been trained).

For other anti-spam options, see:

http://www.caube.org.au/guite.htm