296313 - Allow user to bounce junk mail back to sender - similar to MailWasher

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 109930

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Aaron Whitehouse]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

I have found that the amount of spam I receive drops off dramatically when the
messages are bounced back to the sender. It would be nice if TB could do this
with messages received and identified as spam so that I didn't have to run
MailWasher at all. 

I believe that this depends on Bug 29631 but I may be wrong.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Apologies, I did not paste the full bug number!

The bug that I believe this to depend on is not Bug 29631, but Bug 296312

Sorry!

Comment 2

[Karsten Düsterloh]

This is just plain nonsens.
If you get spam, there are three possibilities:
- the return address does not exist:
  => you will be causing unnecessary traffic
- the return address belongs to the spammer:
  => you are validating that your address is read
  faking the reply so that it looks like a MTA bounce doesn't help either,
  because spammers usually don't weed out addresses - they send spam to
  everything that has @ in it, eg. message-ids
- the return address does not belong to the spammer:
  => you're hassling innocent victims

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 109930 ***

Comment 4

[Aaron Whitehouse]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This is just plain nonsens.
I disagree, but I suppose that is likely when one's comments are called rubbish.

I agree with your 1st and 3rd outlined situations. The second, however, I do not. 
According to the mailwasher FAQ:
---
MailWasher® Pro can bounce a message one of two ways:

   1. Local option - The bounce is sent back via your ISP's postmaster.
   2. Remote option - The bounce is sent back via the sender's SMTP server.

In either case, the bounce looks exactly like it has come from your ISP and not
from your address.
---
However, more importantly than that, due solely to the use of Mailwasher
Bouncing, spam for one of my email accounts dropped from 123 messages on average
per day to average 8 messages per day. To me that is enough evidence that,
whatever you believe to be the theory, in practice it does make a difference.

Thanks for your comments - perhaps you should visit:
http://www.firetrust.com/firetrustcontactus.html
and tell them that they are wasting an entire team's development hours.

Regardless, this issue has been duped - apologies for that; I searched for
different key words. In addition, there is plenty of comment on the other bug
and so I think I will leave the issue alone!