Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: https://64.22.124.245/viewfrag?id=6047

I'll have to concur with Stephen on this one: backscatter spam (wherein the source is forged (legitimate domain name plus random collection of user names) is incredibly annoying. For a while I had my domain set to put all email that had no real mailbox home into one account for verification; recently I went away for a weekend and came back to 11,000 bounced spam messages. That's eleven thousand replies from other mail servers refusing delivery of spam because it's spam or because the user it was being sent to doesn't exist. Just think how many others are correctly configured not to send out the acknowledgments on spam receipt and the sheer mass of emailed crap jumps out at you.

With this kind of volume, spammers are pretty close to making email an unusable communication medium. It's only the inventiveness of the various spam-killer tools combined with filters and process that are keeping it manageable. No one may be getting hurt here but spammers are a very real danger to the viability of email.