Don’t Bounce Spam

I remember using that “Bounce” command in Mail.app a few times many years ago. My intentions were good: to convince spammers that my email doesn’t exist and they shouldn’t bother. But I always sort of wondered whether it was worth it, and whether I would sufficiently fool the sender that my email address no longer existed, or whether it would just indicate that I was alive and actively looking at spam before bouncing it.

Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve, is the man I trust for all things spam. He says bouncing is useless, and may be dangerous. So that settles it.

Speaking of SpamSieve, I should read the manual one of these days. You install it, you train it, and then it basically just works. So it’s easy to forget about it and never bother really exploring all of its features. I recently discovered that SpamSieve logs every decision it makes along with some pretty interesting information about why it made it. So if you ever spot a misjudged spam or ham message, take a look at the log message for some interesting details about why it may have happened. (Then train it so SpamSieve learns how to remedy its error).

PS SpamSieve satellite tool for UNIX servers pretty please. If I could run SpamSieve on the server, and administer the corpus remotely from my Mac, I’d be an extremely happy camper. This would also be a killer feature for many iPhone owners.

Update: Michael is on a tear today with good SpamSieve tips. His note about spam forged from “me” may be inspired by a question I asked him a few days ago, where spam was being automatically let through from one of my many business addresses. Simply adding the address to the “Me” card in Address Book fixed the problem!