The spam in my in-box keeps growing and therefore I am looking for an effective method or software to bounce back those unwanted emails so they do not reach my spam mailbox. I have searched the internet but could not find a cheap and effective solution. Maybe some of you experiencing the same have found an effective solutiona and can advise.

Most spam emails have fake return addresses, so redirecting the email does not work.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Regards

 

I found that making an email acct with rly offensive swear words in it ensures the acct gets blocked by the spammers' rude word filter. I have got precisely one spam message (literally this week) in ten years. It was quite hilarious, tho, so Ima kind of regretting it... =(

 

That's probably only possible if you have a valid response email address. All the spam I get have fake email addresses so my response cannot be delivered. That asks for another approach.
As there surely are programmers here who have a deeper understanding of software, there may be other ways I don't know about.

 

Don't ever bounce back unsolicited e-mails, spammers sometimes use this for backscatter spam.

What e-mail client and/or service are you using, the rest depends on that.

One approach (as used by gmail for instance) is to give your address with a tag like

Code:

[email protected]

, and gmail will automatically tag it like that, now you can reject emails not carrying this tag.

The best way really is to use a whitelist (i.e. only allow emails from addresses I give, rubbish the rest), but that takes time to maintain and no-one outside your approved list can send you e-mail.

An aside, for future throwaway e-mails (like one-off logons and suchlike) temp-mail is a godsend.

*edit:* formatting

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 27, 2020

My email client is Postbox 7, but the spam concerns a Gmail address.
Will try the tag-option you suggest. Will the whitelisting also prevent email from reaching my spam-box?
Will also look into temp-mail.

Thanks so far for your suggestions!

 

Gmail filters allow to straight up delete and not send it to spam. If I remember correctly you apply actions "Skip inbox" (redundant, but hey), "Delete" and "Never send to Spam".

 

Forget about bouncing back. You need to understand how the computer works, so here goes :

When you switch on, the computer asks yous ISP for an IP Address. every IP address in the world is unique.

The IP address will probably change at least every time you switch on, sometimes while you aren't using the internet.

Google for WhatIsMyIpAddress (all one word) do it every day, 2 or three times and you'll understand what I'm saying.

Copy the IP Address and browse to https://www.mxtoolbox.com select Blacklists. You'll probably find that you IP Address is Blacklisted. What does this mean?

It can mean one of two things. Either your computer has been hacked and some hacker is using it to spew out spam from YOUR computer (and you won't even know it) OR someone else had that IP address and used it for spam and now you've ended up with it..

If your IP Address is Blacklisted, then any mail that you send to a server with Blacklist Blocking (like mine) will never receive that email. So if you send messages that aren't getting received. That's the problem. ISP's in general don't care, all they want is your cash - COMPLAIN

The spammer takes a compromised IP Address and forges the name of the sender (eg., [email protected] or [email protected]). This means that the spammer can create a million different sender names for a SINGLE IP Address. Once you understand this, you will understand that Spam Blockers and Greylists and ANYTHING that looks at the SENDER, is a waste of time. So you put [email protected] into you junk mail filter, but it won't block [email protected] even though its from the same spammer.

You need to look at the HEADER of a spam mail. this will show you the IP Address that the spammer is using. If you can block this IP address you will block all the forged sender names also from that spammer.

The only REAL way to block IP Addresses is to use a firewall. Get hold of an old PC, with 4GB or so of RAM any old CPU and a couple of humdred MB (yes MB) Hard drive and download and install Smoothwall Express. it's FREE and it's easy to setup. You put this between your Modem / DSL / whatever and your computer(s) and block the spammers IP addresses on the Firewall.

I'm sure there are programs that will block IP Addresses as well but I haven't found one or bothered to look. my firewall is 100% efficient, I get around 2 spam mail per month and they get blocked as soon as they arrive.

Got it? You're probably not REALLY interested, but at least I tried.

 

I'm sorry but this drivel is, to put it mildly, a load of bollocks.

*sigh*

ISPs care very much, that's why they routinely block inbound and outbound SMTP addresses to prevent this. Used to work for one.

And if they don't block it, and you're running an SMTP server, then you're on a business contract, and these don't come with dynamic IPs. MX records, and delivery on those pretty much require a static IP.

Relay abuse, while common, is also routinely acted on. Besides big time relays use DKIM to authenticate so smaller MTAs are easily detected when spam flooding, and have for years.

It's useless to look at the sender, true, that's why spam filters don't use it. At the simplest you use Bayesian scoring or somesuch heuristic. Probably modern ones are well trained (since there's a huge fucking corpus for spam) ML models.

Again, unless you run your own MTA this does fuck all. You will not get the spammer's IP, period so that's nonsensical. What are you going to do, block outbound IMAPS? And if you use (and unless you have very specifically done so) normal IMAP then are you going to run your own spam filter on a layer 7 firewall? Smoothwall express does no such thing, to begin with, and I'm not even sure that the paid version does DPI on e-mail.

You do realize this is in direct contradiction with your previous paragraph, right?

Try harder next time please.

Kind regards,
an ex-sysadmin in recovery

 

If ISP's care so much, why are there >15 million spam emails, making up over 50% of all emails, sent every day?

I only need ONE example - Comcast USA, they have hundreds of blacklisted IP Addresses. In my experience, very, very few IP Addresses that are blacklisted, ever get off the blacklists.

I'm not sure where you come from, nor do I care, but in Europe you get a fixed amount of bandwidth every month. Once that is exceeded, the ISP throttles back your speed to just about nothing, so you have to pay more to get the speed back.They don't care if your bandwidth is used sending spam.

VERY few ISP's care how much spam is sent, because all they want is your MONEY.

As for protection, I am not going to argue with millenial mindsets that were taught that they should only think inside the box. There are ways around everything, but it depends on how much you know. I was working on a PDP-11, while you were probably a glint in your father's eye.

Personally, I don't give a shit how much spam people get. So some on this forum obviously don't appreciate anyone who tries to offer some advice. I learn very quickly. I promise never to try to give any advice to anyone ever again on this forum.

Please accept my humble apologies, and you can be rude to other people as much as you like.

 

I don't appreciate misinformation. This post again contains multitude of errors (most of which was covered in my previous message).

First, ISPs don't have open relays, haven't done for years. If an ISP would allow spam through their MTAs, then they would get blacklisted. So yes, they care.

And I'm in Europe, and I've got unlimited bandwidth with no throttling. My ISPs (for personal and business) would have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing me to abuse their mail service.

Sure, you're an PDP expert, but things have moved on, the good ol' MAIL FROM:/RCPT TO: SMTP trick hasn't worked for ages (and nice ad hominem with the "millenial" sideswipe, and you got that wrong too).

And that's not a humble apology, that's self martyring right there.

And besides, if you'd bothered to read OPs dilemma, none of your advice would've mattered even if it was correct (it was not). GMail usage was/is the issue here, not blacklists or firewalls or or...

 

Arguing about

Spoiler

the nature of / insight needed to understand / trumpety trump

spam... isn't that just yet moar spam? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also, Spelunky 2 is out - you have much better things to do nao!)

 

May I suggest Mailwasher. I've been using an early free version of Mailwasher Pro v6.5.4 developed by New Zealand's Firetrust. It's been running on various Windows PCs for around 25 years and intercepts all spam from my web host's servers BEFORE they reach my Thunderbird email inbox. I can delete the crap directly at the server end, bounce it, forward it to SpamCop, ban it to a blacklist and send 'good' emails to my inbox.

The developer has since offered a number of fancier MW versions with more bells and whistles on a subscription service for $$$ but the freebie does everything I need.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 29, 2020

how would you bounce a message at al ?
Evenat sieve level makes it no sense since you probably would bounce back to another email and therefor sending spam Reject just means that you return teh mail to the sender. remember the sender email can be anything
You could configure it to delete spam, but then you could even do it in teh client directly, so it makes less sense.

Something like this is better imo:
https://www.signal-spam.fr/en/
They process spamm and forward stuff to blacklists.

Or these guys:
https://www.spamcop.net/
But forwarding spam mails as attachment got recently blocked by my ISP so I prefet the previous

It would be awesome if there would be a mail server (not client) which can bounce senders at ip level , direct when someone tries to send the email, before it even get accepted, so that the sender get a direct message that the mail could not be delivered. That would make spammers more angry And woudl be more effective. I wonder why this isnt standard theses days.

A IP range black list would be handy so that you could block all emails from certain countries,and separate IP's

 

Last edited: Sep 29, 2020

Been bussy, but will go over the responses and put usefull info to work.
Thanks for all positive and constructive responses.
Have a nice day all.

Cheers.