removal of "bounce" spam action in 4.26.7

[Michael Janssen]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Jay Berkenbilt wrote:

> I see in the release announcement for 4.26.7 that the "bounce" spam
> action has been removed.  I'm curious about this.  We use this feature
> for spam that scores in the 5 to 10 range and send a bounce that
> instructs the user to send mail to a special mailbox which is not
> filtered.  This allows us to let false positives through. We probably
> get about 5 messages a week for a 50 person company, and most of the
> messages are important. This is enough to convince me that this is an
> important feature.  I can only guess that it's been removed because
> such a huge amount of spam has invalid addresses.

*valid* addresses are the worse thing: spammer faking their from-address
to the address of another person. This is why you can't bounce spam
without making a possibly huge number of persons nervous, angry,
lethargic about all the false spam-bounces they get. It's simply no good
style because you would leave the work of sorting out bounces of
true-negative and false-positive spam.

You can do this work on your own when you forward low score spam to a
special, "ugly", account and sort out false-positives by your own. Which
is lot of stupid work but can be tackled down with better whitelisting
and such.

On our site, we provide daily informations about received spam for each
account and leave it to each user to take this serious and check these
spamlists for seldom false-positves (this means instead of deleting
several spam per day you search one mail for ham list-entries). Works
quite well because a human can distinct anonymous spam from
personal important mail very fast.

Michael