Don’t Bounce Spam
I remember using that “Bounce” command in Mail.app a few times many years ago. My intentions were good: to convince spammers that my email doesn’t exist and they shouldn’t bother. But I always sort of wondered whether it was worth it, and whether I would sufficiently fool the sender that my email address no longer existed, or whether it would just indicate that I was alive and actively looking at spam before bouncing it.
Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve, is the man I trust for all things spam. He says bouncing is useless, and may be dangerous. So that settles it.
Like Daniel, I used to use it bounce spam a few years ago. I stopped doing it partially out of laziness and partially because I never got the feeling that it was effective. It always seemed more cathartic then anything else. I was going to trick those spammers. After reading Michael’s comments, I’m glad I stopped. It was probably doing more harm then good.