Re: [CH] RE: Mailwasher
Scott Peterson (scottp4@mindspring.com)
Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:09:37 -0700
At 08:05 AM 9/9/2004, Yvonne B wrote:
>Not sure if it really helps or not, but Mailwasher will bounce your spam
>back to the sender, and make it look like you don't have a valid address.
>FWIW. (Although the return address on spam is usually forged anyway.)
This feature is one of the main reasons that many mail administrators would
reserve a special room in hell for Nick Bolton, the developer of the program.
This is one of those features that's intended to really make you feel
good. You've put something over on a spammer. The only problem is that
it's a lie and it abuses innocent people.
First of all, the reply address in the spam you get is almost always
forged. When it's not, it's usually someone that the spammers wants to
take revenge on. So the spammer will never see the bounce. So at best
you've accomplished nothing and, at worst, you've helped mailbomb someone.
Second, even if they did see the bounce, unless they're a complete idiot,
they'd know that a bounce hours or days later is not a real bounce and what
you've really done is confirm to him that your address is good.
Next, getting back to those bounces you sent, where do you think they
go? Well, if Mailwasher didn't alter the mail, all those bad addresses
would eventually come back to you and you'd know that the product was a
fraud. So what it does is alter the return address to
postmaster@yourisp. So they end up with most of the spam you bounce. Most
mail administrators end up having to write special filters to keep their
critical contact accounts free of this garbage.
People have pleaded with Bolton for years to drop this feature, but it's
such a great selling point for his program that he won't do it even though
he admits it doesn't work and never did.
Having said that, the program has some nice features if you stay away from
the bounce button. I've looked at it because some clients were interested,
but I think the approach is fundamentally flawed. It's dependent upon
having mailwasher look at the mail on the server and then asking you to
confirm mailwasher's decisions. Having done that, you then fire up your
mail program and download whatever remains of your mail.
What I've found is that once you get over a couple of hundred emails a day,
it's just too much bother even on a dialup. It's faster to download the
mail and process it on your computer. There are a number of excellent
programs that will sit in front of your email program and perform all the
filtering activities using the same block lists and other methods with no
manual intervention.
Scott Peterson
--
Growing old is mandatory;
growing up is optional.
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