Do you think Mail.app bounce feature fools spammers?

[Mactel]

Most of the bounces don't get bouced back with address errors so do you think it's accomplishing anything?

[spacescape]

No, not really... However I occasionally use it to get out of doing things that night... "Sorry, I didn't get your e-mail... "

[davec]

Bounces from Mail just let spammers know that they have an active (live) email address. IMHO spamming would increase. Dave

[JoeH]

Since the return address is frequently forged, bouncing usually just ends up putting the spam into someone else's mail account. Not into the spammer's.

[RAMd®d]

What JoeH said.

I don't know what info a bounced e-mail contains (I.e. does it show the difference between a live and dead address), so davec might have a point as well.

[shadow]

[quote davec]Bounces from Mail just let spammers know that they have an active (live) email address. IMHO spamming would increase. Dave
The bounce message that is generated should, in theory, look just like the same message that a mail server would generate if it receives an email for a user that does not exist. In such a case, a sender would assume the email address is bad.

This is different than following the unsubscribe information in spam email, which does in fact, alert spammers that they have a live one.

[karsen]

Chances are you will be bouncing an email back to a false email address, which will in turn bounce it back at you. I've found it's best to just leave spam alone.

Spam Sieve has worked extremely well for my spam problem. I bought it in January, since then I've had 38,077 spams, and Spam Seive has been 99.5% correct in identifying those.

[TheTominator]

When my e-mail address is used as a spammer's forged e-mail return address, I get these bounced messages. It is a real PITA both to receive the extra spam via this method and to know that spammers have harvested my e-mail address from my website and are pretending to be me in their offense.

So no, I don't think the bounce feature has any impact whatsoever on the spammers. It does have the negative impact of increasing the volume of spam-related e-mail traffic.