| Which is the best reason to not bounce or send autoreplies.
OTOH, for a while, my practice of autoreplying some recipes, and bouncing
certain others, seemed to have been working, i.e., a smoothed graph of
spam vs. time had a negative slope. But now it's picking up again, so I
have to re-think my strategy.
Another good reason is that all those bounces, which get ignored by the
spammer/recipient anyway, still take up needless bandwith on the net.=20
The spam is bad enough for that, bouncing it back with some more stuff
added is just plain silly. You become part of the problem rather than=20
the solution. IMHO, of course.
Especially since the spammers forge host names as well as user names. The
bounce doesn't even go to the spammer's host! But if there was a reliable
way to detect the true originating host amongst the forged Received:
headers, I would love to search the body for an address at that host,
change From: to that address, and THEN do a bounce 77. :-)
I would certainly recommend that if you MUST send auto-replies, restrain
your wrath because without an infallible artificial genius at work, you're
guaranteed some of the recipients are victims rather than spammers.