Autoresponders and dodging spam

[thegroover]

Here's an idea to bounce around:

What if you could make a catch-all autoresponder that would automatically destroy the message sent to unlisted email accounts and send a nice reply that says "You have entered an invalid email address. Please find a suitable email contact by navigating to http://www.domain.com or lodge a support request at http://www.webdevelopersdomain.com if you believe this is wrong."

I assume that spam comes from some robot script that masks the real email address so basically, unless the robot finds your email address, it cannot assume it to be something like contact@domain.com but this way also saves those legitimate accidental mispellings.

I don't expect this to rid spam but it may reduce it whilst preserving the 'just in case' situations.

Cheers,
Michael Black.

[wmeyers]

The best way to reduce spam is to not sign up for internet mailing lists...anytime you enter your e-mail address for anything you risk being added to a list no matter what checkboxes you may clear.

You can click on the unsubscribe links for many and will be removed, but there are plenty of dishonest lists out there who don't care whether or not you receive the message, they just want to blast out as many as they can. If you bounce something back it won't make any difference to them. There are list managers like lyris that will see a bounce and remove you, but the bounce has to match some specific formula for that to happen.

In short, its a good idea, but I don't think its really going to do much good. I use Outlook Express, and installed a spam blocker with a 30 day trial. I didn't really like it enough to purchase it so I removed it, but it left behind all the rules that block spam, so most of my spam goes right into the deleted items folder. I check it to make sure there are no false positives - I get very few - and then empty the trash. This works well for me for a problem that really has no solution until the gov't finally starts doing something to address this issue.

Regards,

WM

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