[Spambayes] trying to send in a suggestion for your software..

[Tim Peters]

[Jason Wolfe]
> I love your software - our CTO suggested it and I dove right and and
> it is working nicely for me.  Being an online figure with alot of
> traffic to our sites I end up on alot of lists and get hundreds of
> spam emails every day. I used MailWasher - which was nice -- but it
> wasnt built into Outlook like yours, and wasnt built to learn.
>
> However, one of the good items they had was to 'bounce' my spam back
> to the spammer.  Then the spammer thinks the email address is not
> active.
>
> Do you have plans to add this functionality?

Nope, but we have firm plans not to add it <wink>.  See FAQ question

    6.5 Why can't I bounce spam back to the sender?
    http://spambayes.sf.net/faq.html

The short course is that spammers almost always forge the sender address,
which you can't fully appreciate until they start forging *your* address,
and you get overwhelmed by angry people sending spam back to *you*.

Rejecting the attempt to deliver the message to your mail server in the
first place would be OK, but Outlook is too late in the chain to do that.

Note that the MailWasher FAQ says:

    If the spammer has used a fake address, then your bounce
    message will itself be bounced back to the postmaster and
    you won't receive the bounced bounce email.

You will, however, clog your ISP with two sdditional rounds of useless
traffic:  your futile bounce attempt, and the bounce back of your futile
bounce attempt.

What the MailWasher FAQ doesn't say is that this doesn't usually happen:
the return address on spam is usually a good (not fake) address, but a
forged good address that has nothing to do with the spammer.  If you're an
online figure, you'll eventually experience this joy yourself.