Bounces

[Cue]

I am getting an average of five bounces from spam each day and that has been going on for months already. What can I do?

My ISP is not helping unless mail is send out from the own network. They refer to Spamcop as being the place to report all other mail abuse. Spamcop doesn't seem to help me because the focus is on spam and ignore the problem of bounces being as severe or worse as spam itself for bounce victims, or am I the only one who gets more bounces then spam??

I've surfed your website and forum and maybe I overlooked something but I can't find any usefull help on this topic that is suitable for noobs like me.

Please advice.

[yourbuddy]

Some Spammer has forged your email address as the return address,

so you are getting the bounces - this is a fairly common practice now.

Bounces are (AFAIK) not to be reported as spam to SpamCop - there's

not much you can do except obtain/use a good spam filtering program.

There are several choices, incl. POPFile and K9 (that run on your PC).

[Miss Betsy]

As yourbuddy says, there is not much you can do about bounces to your address where the return path has been forged except filter them out.

If you want to try, you can send an email to the abuse desks of the people bouncing them to you complaining about the problem. If you don't know how to read headers, you can parse them using spamcop. If you just paste the headers, spamcop will not prepare a report, but will give you the abuse address. It could be someone using the "bounce" feature on Mailwasher and possibly the abuse desk would ask them to stop. If the abuse desk accepts email and then sends a bounce, they may stop if they start getting enough complaints.

Since it has become so common, I don't think it is worthwhile to complain to the ISP's of the actual spammers.

Miss Betsy